The Subject of Human Being 2018024846, 9781138183186, 9781315642499

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The Subject of Human Being

The Subject of Human Being presents a sweeping account of the nature of human existence. As a work of philosophical anthropology, the analysis ranges from the basic powers emerging from the mind, to our extraordinary psychological capacities, to the shared sociocultural worlds we inhabit. The book integrates different perspectives on social ontology from a selection of philosophers and theorists, whose advances toward understanding the relationship between individuals and society ought to revolutionize social theory as understood and practiced in the social sciences and humanities. Although grounded in the critical realist philosophy of Roy Bhaskar and the social theory of Margaret Archer, the book also draws from philosophy of mind, phenomenology of consciousness, psychoanalytic theory, virtue ethics, and personalism to support and extend its arguments. Four elements of human existence are examined: the nature of consciousness, agency, subjectivity, and the social world. Thus, it addresses related issues of power, the agent-​structure problem, the formation of beliefs and desires, human universals, and human rights. Portraying a unified social theory that is materialist, realist, dialectical, and centered on emergence, and offering a comprehensive and progressive theory of human being, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of critical realism, philosophy, and the social sciences. Christopher W. Haley is an independent scholar based in Austin, Texas, USA.

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Routledge Studies in Critical Realism

Critical Realism is a broad movement within philosophy and social science. It is a movement that began in British philosophy and sociology following the founding work of Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer and others. Critical Realism emerged from the desire to realise an adequate realist philosophy of science, social science, and of critique. Against empiricism, positivism and various idealisms (interpretivism, radical social constructionism), Critical Realism argues for the necessity of ontology. The pursuit of ontology is the attempt to understand and say something about ‘the things themselves’ and not simply about our beliefs, experiences, or our current knowledge and understanding of those things. Critical Realism also argues against the implicit ontology of the empiricists and idealists of events and regularities, reducing reality to thought, language, belief, custom, or experience. Instead Critical Realism advocates a structural realist and causal powers approach to natural and social ontology, with a focus upon social relations and process of social transformation. Important movements within Critical Realism include the morphogenetic approach developed by Margaret Archer; Critical Realist economics developed by Tony Lawson; as well as dialectical Critical Realism (embracing being, becoming and absence) and the philosophy of metaReality (emphasising priority of the non-​dual) developed by Roy Bhaskar. For over thirty years, Routledge has been closely associated with Critical Realism and, in particular, the work of Roy Bhaskar, publishing well over fifty works in, or informed by, Critical Realism (in series including Critical Realism:  Interventions; Ontological Explorations; New Studies in Critical Realism and Education). These have all now been brought together under one series dedicated to Critical Realism. The Centre for Critical Realism is the advisory editorial board for the series. If you would like to know more about the Centre for Critical Realism, or to submit a book proposal, please visit www.centreforcriticalrealism.com. Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society A Critical Realist Account Graham Scambler Empiricism and The Metatheory of The Social Sciences Roy Bhaskar Ethical Consumption: Practices and Identities A Realist Approach Yana Manyukhina The Subject of Human Being Christopher W. Haley For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/​ Routledge-​ S tudies-​ i n-​ C ritical- ​ Realism- ​ Routledge- ​ C ritical-​ Realism/​book-​series/​SE0518

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The Subject of Human Being Christopher W. Haley

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First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Christopher W. Haley The right of Christopher W. Haley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Haley, Christopher W., author. Title: The subject of human being / Christopher W. Haley. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge studies in critical realism | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018024846 | ISBN 9781138183186 (hbk) | ISBN 9781315642499 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophical anthropology. Classification: LCC BD450 .H247 2018 | DDC 128–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024846 ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​18318-​6  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​315-​64249-​9  (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Out of House Publishing

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For Andreana

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Contents

Acknowledgments  1 Introduction 

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2 Philosophical materialism 

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3 The ontology of consciousness 

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4 The ontology of subjectivity 

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5 The subject of psychoanalysis 

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6 The subject of structure 

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7 Social ontology 

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8 Conclusion 

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Index 

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Acknowledgments

This book is the culmination of many years of study and a subject that has fascinated me since I  encountered the “agent-​structure problem” and the “question of ontology” as a graduate student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Virginia. I would like to thank the following people for their intellectual guidance in my education and thinking, each of whom interceded at important moments in the direction this book takes: Momchil Abadzhiev, Ann Anagnost, Kevin Boileau, Jason Craig, Fred Damon, Creston Davis, Kaushik Ghosh, Linda Hansen, Mervyn Hartwig, Sylvain Poosson, Hanan Sabea, Mak Stanchev, and Thomas Tierney. Second, I  thank Kit Belgum for editorial assistance with chapter four, Linda Hansen with chapter eight, and Jay Whitten with chapters one, two, seven, and eight. Any remaining faults, of course, are mine. Third, I thank Alice Salt, Emma Thompson, Richard Skipper, and Alan Jarvis at Routledge for their support and understanding. Lastly, I thank my parents, Anne and Chip Haley, for their care and generosity over the many years of pursuing education, raising children, and developing my interests. I also express my gratitude for my wife, Andreana, and our two sons, Adrian and Gabriel, whose support and encouragement carried me through this project to its end. A truncated version of chapter three, “The Ontology of Consciousness,” was published in Presencing EPIS Journal 2014: A Scientific Journal of Applied Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, & Critical Theory (2015. Vol 1.  Missoula, MT: EPIS Press), and is used with permission.

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1  Introduction

Human being What is a human being? There is no more immediate and consequential philosophical problem than human self-​definition. Answers to the question inevitably if not axiomatically shape human institutional reality, governing family, polity, economy, and the infinite permutations of the social world. It might be considerate to provide a comparative study of the many different answers to the question, drawing on Western philosophical, theological, and secular sources with a frank appreciation of cross-​cultural alternatives from India, China, and sub-​Saharan Africa to celebrate and relativize all conceptions of how a human being can be defined. The supra-​universalism of such an inclusive party, however, is nothing more than a tautology. Human being is thusly defined as “what you see is what you get,” or perhaps more accurately, “what you know is what you get.” In any case, tautological expressions of human “being” in its specific practice and institutional life are taken as “at one” or identical with its self-​nature. On the surface the implication is that human nature is plastic and endlessly malleable to the hand of cultural determinants. This is a consequence, however, of a more fundamental unease, a relativistic tendency generated by an underlying skepticism toward “objective” knowledge and the real problem of categorical imperialism, whether by “presentism” or “ethnocentrism.” Because it is true:  in the totality of human habitation on earth, the diversity, alterity, and seeming incommensurability of cultural and historical differences, of thousands of different languages and religions and profoundly different familial, political, and economic systems, yields a sense that any attempt to provide a universal philosophical anthropology could only really be a “local prejudice.” The Subject of Human Being proposes that human being cannot be defined in exclusive (or reductionist) terms of being “as is,” whether historical, cultural, or social on the one hand, and certainly not biological, universal, or transcendental on the other. Instead, an objective definition of the nature of human being must account for individual, sociocultural, and universal facets of each human being, and provide a theory of how the universal intersects with the concrete, local, idiosyncratic features of all peoples in all places in all

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2 Introduction times. Accordingly, the central premise upon which this book succeeds or fails is that social theory has advanced to a point where it is now possible to provide an interdisciplinary account of the universal features, powers, capacities of being human on the one hand, and the concrete and geohistorically specific features, structures, forms, institutions of social being on the other, wedded together as a unified social theory. The nature of human being, therefore, is both given and not given. It is given because there are universal features of humankind, granted by the shared features of biology, consciousness, agency, subjectivity, language, and intersubjectivity. It is not given because for every “self ” in the world, each person has only actualized through language, culture, identity(s), and social interactions. What is universal in each person is only manifested in particular social contexts that precede them in time.1 The great theoretical challenge is to model the fact that social prerequisites for human existence are simultaneously dependent on human beings for their existence. Humankind produces its social conditions of existence. Individual selves are subjected to these conditions, fundamentally in reference to a set of beliefs and desires concerning their world. Thus the “self ” becomes a “subject” through the combination of ontological features of human being that are universal to its kind and ontological features of the social world that condition the self in concrete geohistorical and sociocultural milieus. At the heart of human being is a gap created by belief and desire, detaching human existence from the surrounding conditions of existence. Human belief has a truth condition to be true that often succeeds but also routinely and systematically fails. Human desire has a fulfillment condition to be fulfilled that separates the world as it is from the world desired to be. For both beliefs and desires, the psychoanalytic, anthropological, and philosophical question revolves around their formation. What a person believes and desires is informed by their social milieu but not determined by their milieu. At the same, beliefs and desires, especially those revolving around conceptions of what it means to be human by definition, become “reasons for action.” They become the impetus for the development and (re)production of social institutions, social structures, and the rights, duties, and liabilities of deontological powers associated with institutions and structures of social relationships. The fundamental feature of human being is the nature of its consciousness, which is the ground-​zero point for the properties and capacities of human being that distinguish it from other forms of life on earth. Human consciousness has four key emergent properties that are established by retroduction and phenomenological analysis. Human awareness of being aware is predicated on the temporality of consciousness to anticipate the future and remember the past in relation to an ongoing present. Temporal awareness establishes an enduring point of reference: the self, who remembers and makes plans in the moment. Likewise for the capacity to direct one’s conscious attention to any point of stimulus through the five senses. Some “thing” is directing one’s

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Introduction 3 attention and has reasons for the action (even if the reason can only be given after the fact). The “self ” is thus the “thing” that directs its attention to all things “on the mind.” This capacity is the ontological basis for human agency as a real, emergent causal power and grounds the mechanism of reflexivity. Moreover, the meta-​awareness of a self conscious of itself entails an existential gap of indeterminacy, which precludes, in principle, the potential for biological, sociological, and psychological determinations bearing on the subject. It precludes what subjects have believed and have desired by interrupting their automatic transference to the next moment as what the subject will believe and will desire. At the same time, the gap draws the subject into the existential predicament of deciding, however obscured, “what comes next in time.” The gap thus compels the subject forward to do something, make something, or say something (or just give up and go back to bed); it is the moment all beliefs have to be reconfirmed and the original ground of human desire. The two “gaps” of belief and desire inaugurate an intertwined philosophical task—​the discovery of “correct beliefs” and formation of “ethical desires.” The deep fallibility of human understanding leads to misidentification and mystification of what is universal and unconditional, and what is cultural and contingent. Human institutions reflect deep-​held values and beliefs. Human institutions are also, at their core, created to enhance human power through configurations of social relations. Taken together, when beliefs are wrong, institutional reality becomes distorted and oppressive. Faulty beliefs beget destructive social institutions that normalize, naturalize, or enforce relations of power in three general domains: relations of domination between people; exploitation of nature/​biosphere/​other species by humankind; and privileging of the present at the expense of people and the planet in the future. It is simplistic to assume “true beliefs” will “save the day” by fostering a progressive institutional reality that no longer supports exploitation and domination. At the same time, it is apparent both within the Western world and around the world that humanity and its many societies are divided by secular and religious ideologies—​divided by ontological claims for human being. This work defends a philosophical anthropology that transcends relativism and sectarian fundamentalisms. In the long haul of their development, social-​theoretical and philosophical understandings of the “subject and society” have reached their apogee. An expressly ontological and unified social theory has the power to effect a radical immanent critique of all existing definitions of human being, whether theories of the “folk,” religious mystics and theologians, or philosophers of the spirit. The immanent critique acts as an agent of change, dissolving the rationalizations for and legitimacy of institutional structures that fail to provide conditions for human flourishing. The purpose of exploring The Subject of Human Being, consequently, is to understand the relations between what is objective and universal to human being and what is subjective and particular to human beings. The basic phenomenal experience of the self unifies four key facets of human being: a bio-​ state of conscious awareness, a self-​directed power of agency, a symbolically

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4 Introduction mediated social existence, and a geohistorical location with specific structures of social positions and powers. In the course of being alive all facets meld together, giving the “mouthfeel” of each person’s unique stance in the world—​ in other words, human subjectivity emerges. The analytical separation of universal and particular aspects of human being facilitates the task to theorize the relatively independent powers and capacities of human consciousness, agency, and social forms in their contribution to the larger structure of subjectivity.2 Only by separating what is “real” for all human beings from the “reality” of being alive in a particular time and place can human “thoughts and theories” about humankind be rectified.

Dialectical critical realism The methodology I  employ takes an overtly multidisciplinary approach to discover overlapping and converging points of agreement from philosophical, psychoanalytic, and social-​theoretical treatments of the self in relation to the social. As a project of theory-​building, I take pertinent texts and undertake close readings to integrate their strengths and supplement their weaknesses and lacunas. My philosophical orientation is grounded, foremost, in Margaret Archer’s realist sociological theory and the dialectical critical realist (DCR) movement inaugurated by Roy Bhaskar. Archer’s and Bhaskar’s works, while independently developed, are philosophically compatible and mutually enriching. DCR (I will use this acronym to reference the commonality of Archer, Bhaskar, and other “family members”) reinvigorates ontological speculation, countering the epistemological turn in modern philosophy (and its positivist offshoots) and the linguistic turn in postmodern thought. DCR provides a realist, emergentist, materialist, processual, and dialectical framework to understand the world. It is upon these touchstones that I evaluate the explanatory power of various concepts and theories to uncover and explain the “nature” and powers of human being in relation to the necessary social predicates for meaningful, efficacious practices, in the doing, saying, and making of human life. The philosophy of “critical realism” takes its name from the conflation of Kantian “critical philosophy” and Humean “empirical realism,” while jettisoning both Kant’s and Hume’s common error, what Bhaskar identifies as the epistemic fallacy. The fallacy has entailed two general trajectories in Western thought:  the rationalism of the “transcendental ego” for Kant, versus the empiricism of “sensory impressions” for Hume. In both cases, and despite their epic struggle for ascendancy in philosophy around the world, being (ontology) is marginalized as effectively unknowable when it is assumed that true and justified knowledge can only be of human thoughts and perceptions—​what is “on the mind.” The critique of the epistemic fallacy is the starting point for an ontological realism that overturns all philosophical systems that discount the reality of “Being” as a legitimate object of knowledge by prioritizing epistemological

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Introduction 5 considerations. DCR puts all its cards on the table. Ontological realism defends the claim that there is a real and ineluctable objective world and that all forms of “Being”—​things, processes, structures, and mechanisms—​with sufficient endurance in time and space have an intrinsic capacity to act as “truth makers” of human understanding and scientific explanation. Philosophy in tune with the world requires both ontology and epistemology that are conceived as irreducible to one another. DCR posits the distinction between the domains of the intransitive (world of being) and transitive (world of knowledge). The intransitive dimension includes all relatively independent objects and processes in the world, objects such as volcanoes, the sun, cellular mitosis, evolution, mountains, and trees. Transitive objects of knowledge are the antecedent collection of theories, facts, beliefs, symbolic frameworks, models, paradigms, methods, etc. that form the material base for further knowledge production. In the social world, emergent social forms are dependent on the activities and concepts of human agents in their “doing, saying, and making.” Social forms are “existentially intransitive” because of their “relative endurance,” becoming legitimate objects of social science. DCR is sensitive to the fact the production of knowledge is inscribed by its sociohistorical context because transitive objects are included in the world of being, viz., knowledge of being is constellationally embedded in being. This fact has special bearing on transitive knowledge of the social world. Unlike knowledge of the natural world, knowledge of the social world interpenetrates with its intransitive objects, often conditioning by normative force or critique the social institutions and forms in question. Central to DCR is the theory of emergent powers materialism (as opposed to the ubiquitous “eliminative materialism”), which postulates reality as stratified with levels holding irreducible, sui generis causal powers, from which follows a causal criterion of ontological reality, which demarcates what is “real” in terms of an intrinsic causal power. Emergence is the key DCR philosophical claim, from which all else follows: can higher-​level emergents (their nature, powers, etc.) be completely explained in reference to the emergence basis, or are emergents actually qualitatively novel? Moreover, can parts form wholes with irreducible powers, generated out of the interactions among their parts? If all of reality can be reduced to a reduction base of particle physics, or whatever is the reduction point du jour, and fully explained in terms of their mechanistic determinations, human-​centered reality collapses into an uninteresting and meaningless preordination of particle effects. On the contrary, the “gift” of emergence is a real world with ontological depth and all the multifaceted consequences of emergent powers, not least the causal powers associated with human agency and social forms. This entails that the objects (units of analysis) of social-​scientific research are people and the mechanisms, processes, and structures that constitute social phenomena.3 A  theory of emergence also informs the dialectical aspect of DCR, whereby the emergence of being always has a temporal dimension, marked by the causal powers of

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6 Introduction absence and negation, change and transformation, such that being is always a becoming. The causal criterion can also enframe recent trends in social theory and philosophy that are usually not considered “realist” but still, nonetheless, locate a force or power operating through and animating the social world. For example, on the one hand, out of the Anglo-​American empiricist tradition, contemporary neoclassical economists (neoliberals) and many political scientists and sociologists are realists about “rational individuals” and base all explanations of “social” phenomena as only statistical regularities of the actions of individuals guided by conscious self-​interest and desire fulfillment. A  radically divergent view, out of the continental European (suspicious) tradition, holds that what is “real” exists underneath or outside the conscious individual subject. The chieftains of continental thought follow this course: Nietzsche is a “realist” concerning the “will”; Heidegger a realist concerning the pre-​ontological formations of “Dasein”; Merleau-​Ponty the effects of “embodiment”; Foucault “discourse”; Derrida “text”; Lacan the “big Other-​subconscious”; and Judith Butler gendered “language.”4 For all of these conceptions answering “what is going on in the world and why,” the ontological question seeks the prime mover of social reality, asking:  what mechanisms and powers are in play in the production of the social world?

Social ontology Human beings are, of course, at bottom biological animals, emerging out of some primordial soup on the back of chemistry and physics, and eating, mating, and dying in the due course of life. But unlike other creatures on earth, human beings have a unique capacity. Human speech acts, practices, and productions tend to agglutinate and endure through codification and concretion in time and space. People create social institutions; transform nature into a built environment (Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, the US interstate system, etc.); develop technologies; form polities; and create ideational monuments of religion, philosophy, and law. It seems apparent, at the same time, human day-​to-​day practices and productions are not fully original instances of conduct, but come through subjects as learned, emulated, or dictated, or, in other words, as necessary predicates for coherent, meaningful, and efficacious behavior within a particular social and cultural milieu. Social ontology is concerned with social universals that are transhistorical and transcultural features of human societies, which underlie the multiplicity of cultural and historical variations expressed in human institutions and practices. The central issue of social ontology is the relationship between individual people (agent, subject, ego, person, self) and society (structure, object, culture, collective). What is the relationship between this complex and interconnected system of symbols, ideas, institutions, and practices (for brevity, termed “structure”)—​often generations in the making—​and the consciousness of individual, human subjects descended into a society? To what

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Introduction 7 extent—​if at all—​do individual subjects have the capacity for agency, to act autonomously in the self-​determination of their desires, beliefs, and practices in the face of the heavy weight of multiple social conditions pressing subjects into form? Conversely, human beings are subject to the constraints and possibilities inherent to their geographical and ecological location. They are always historically located and enculturated, given a native tongue (or two), and born into a preexisting social field, often organized hierarchically by caste, socioeconomic status, race, totem, and gender, neither of their making nor of their choice. Consequently, how do structures affect individual subjects—​if at all—​ by enabling and constraining their range of actions and shaping their beliefs and desires? Social ontology is thus an inquiry and theory of the potential causal powers held by the individual as “agent” in relation to the potential causal power of “structure” in which individuals are embedded. The goal of social ontology is to make explicit the philosophical ground of substantive social theory and social science research. It operates as a metatheory of the relationship between people and the world around them, between human consciousness (and subconsciousness) manifesting as intentionalities (beliefs, desires, meaning, and practice) and the sociocultural and geographical-​ historical context of this consciousness. This debate is known as the “agent-​structure problem,” and how this problem is solved is the essential dividing line that separates different social-​theoretical paradigms. The crux of the problem revolves around two apparent facts: there are individuals, and there are societies of people. These two facts entail two further claims as to the relationship between the individual and society: people appear to create society, and society appears to socialize and enculturate people. Social theory has tended to give priority to one or the other:  individualist ontologies or collectivist-​ structuralist ontologies of the social world.5 In the individualist account, “society” is nothing more than the sum total of individual actions, and hence is an epiphenomenon of a group of people. Individual agents are privileged as the sole ontological fount of causal power responsible for social reality (volunteerism/​liberal “rugged” individualism). In the collectivist account, the “individual” is nothing more than a particular instantiation of a collective property, and hence the individual’s essence has been determined by society. Structure is granted sole social ontological power (holism/​poststructuralism/​cultural determinism/​social constructionism). Ultimately the two positions on the agent-​structure relationship are divided by an a priori decision which side holds causal priority over the other. Both theoretical traditions are exclusive and reductionist, with either agents or structures postulated as the source of causal power responsible for social phenomena. DCR transcends this debate. By identifying how both individuals (agents) and collective social forms (structure) have relatively independent and intrinsic forms of causal power and the nature of their interplay, DCR argues agents and structures are dialectically related, while maintaining their ontological

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8 Introduction and analytic independence. The interplay of agents and structures is predicated foremost on the temporal relationship between the two: agents are born into an existing sociocultural milieu, and subsequently are implicated in the production of social structures through their practice, either reproducing or transforming these structures, which consequently become the necessary social predicates for future practice. The distinctive causal powers associated with the ontology of human being and ontology of social being, and their interplay, thus provides a basic explanation of the relationship between agents and structures. Nonetheless, recourse to a process of social reproduction emerging out of a dialectic of agents and structures requires a detailed examination of the agential mechanism by which social forms are created. Drawing on John Searle’s theory of social ontology, grounded in speech act theory, the capacities and powers of human agency at the individual level are joined through collective intentionalities to create and maintain shared meanings and institutions. Human collective intentionality has an intrinsic power to create social powers. Through the process of status function Declarations, things and people are ascribed with deontological powers and liabilities. Status function Declarations in effect combine a belief and a desire simultaneously:  a collective believes something is the case (a ten-​dollar bill has the purchasing power of ten dollars) by desiring to make it the case (modern economies require fungible “storage units” of value to enable exchange and signal prices). In Searle’s view, the singular logic of a Declaration is the mechanism responsible for the creation of a shared social world. Presupposed in collective Declarations of social reality, however, are subject-​agents with beliefs and desires—​with a subjectivity—​that inflect their ongoing relationship with their social milieu. Subjectivity is the linchpin between agency and the social world. On one side, the ontology of subjectivity is grounded in the capacity, as Margaret Archer points out, for reflexive deliberation over sets of concerns, projects, and practices. Reflexivity grants human beings a space of existential indeterminacy enabling the possibility for self-​ determination to assess the value of one’s concerns; to initiate, alter, or cease one’s projects; and to gage the efficacy and implications of one’s practices. On the other side, human subjectivity encapsulates the social and cultural identities, occupations, and roles of the self. Subjectivity, consequently, is the site where three forms of agency interlock. The agency granted by reflexivity, in virtue of ontological powers of human being, intersect with the deontological powers (as forms of agency) associated with the subject’s sociocultural identities and occupations. Subject positions are powerful or disempowering because social positions are always constituted by their relational structure to other positions. For Archer, human concerns manifest into projects to achieve a desired end, e.g., employment, education, intimacy, political freedom, and so on. Of significance are projects that entail relational goods, which emerge from interpersonal cooperation and commitment to the good. Projects are either

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Introduction 9 enabled or constrained by the causal powers inherent to the structured social context of their articulation in relation to the social position(s) of the subject. The relative advantages and disadvantages of social positions are powerful determinants in the sociological destiny of human beings. Initiated at the sociological “site” of their natality, subjects deliberate over their projects and on the personal costs of overcoming constraints, and thus negotiate a sense of “self ” in relation to the social world. DCR social theory, with its ontological focus on emergent and relatively independent causal powers of subject-​agency and structures, provides the means to metatheorize the subject in all their relations. Bhaskar terms the complex of relations the four planes of social being, which identify the four primary relations in the world that constitute the subject: intrapersonal, interpersonal, social institutional, and to the natural world. The properties of each relationship have direct bearing on the self and subjectivity, and encompass points of reference ranging from the psychodynamic to the geopolitical. For instance, on the one side, subjects are always located in large-​scale emergent systems and historical epochs, and affected by demographic trends. Subjects are ensconced in enduring types of structured relationships that enable and constrain their projects, be they familial, social, political, economic, “world system,” or northern versus southern hemispheric positioning. The earth’s biosphere provides the condition of possibility for human existence. At the same time, the earth has its geography mapped over by the nation-​state system, generating geopolitical struggles and shaping the destiny of citizens, migrants, and illegal aliens. Crosscutting the nation-​state grid, global economic relations in terms of labor, raw materials, manufacturing, and capital engender relationships of exchange, mutual dependence, and inequality. Climate change, the nature of global food production, and population growth or decline, aging or “younging,” exert material effects, forming macro-​structural conditions that increasingly bind human beings together by their effects. On the other side, in formulating the ontological basis of subjectivity as a “subject-​agent,” psychoanalytic theory has a definitive role in its conceptualization. Insights from Lacanian and existential psychoanalysis augment DCR because the role of the subconscious in the process of socialization and existential crises of sentience are under-​theorized in DCR social theory. The value of psychoanalysis in its clinical mode adds an important ethical thrust because of the therapeutic goal toward subjectifying the subconscious and ontological givens of existence. Subjectification of these powers “un-​determines” the powers of various mechanisms of enculturation and deformations in the subject’s relations to self, other, and world. By bringing to conscious awareness the powers in play shaping the lives of analysands, subjects begin assuming control of (rejecting, modifying, accentuating) their constitutive effects of these powers. At the same time, psychoanalytic theory is augmented by a realist understanding of social structure and geohistorical positioning as they bear on the subject. A  DCR-​informed psychoanalysis

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10 Introduction uncovers how subjects are interpellated into their sociocultural context in terms of belief and desire, while at the same time subjects are enabled to consider the possibilities nested in the “ontology of the subject” of reflexivity and self-​determination. This exposition of the subject of human being ends with a non-​traditional conclusion. Rather than summarize, “tell what I told,” and propose a wish list of future endeavors for myself and DCR, I have opted to tackle the unstated question of value that lurks beneath the previous chapters. What direction do the powers and capacities of human beings take? Where and how does value emerge to inform the direction of human being? Why are human beings so befuddled and misguided by their beliefs and desires? To begin answering these questions, Roy Bhaskar (and all critical realists likewise) has uncovered through the development of DCR an explicitly normative dimension to human life, revolving around truth and ontological features of humankind. The DCR conception of human nature entails an inherent and emergent dignity, which, without inconsistency, demands universal ascription to others by the phenomenal experience of the self. Foremost, universal human capacities define the ontology of the subject. Human capacities, such as reflexivity, creativity, project development, and so on, consequently ground both universal negative and positive human rights.6 They also provide an evaluative schema grounded in virtue ethics enabling judgment of good and bad practices at the individual level—​entailing a direction for personal transformation—​and good and bad institutional arrangements at the social level, entailing a direction for social transformation. All in all, DCR proposes that value—​deriving an “ought” from what “is”—​can be ontologically justified as a “real thing” in the world of human (and nonhuman) affairs, and a subject whose absence is responsible for ill.

The problem of thinking about thinking about human being The project of philosophy is fundamentally concerned with “thinking about thinking,” and the relationship of subject to object requires premises about how human beings think and the nature of what is thought. Thinking is an action and process—​reflective, reflexive, and creative—​and necessarily requires content for consideration. In other words, any thinking revolving around human being always requires a subject and a “subject” (to which the title of this book alludes in its double entendre). Philosophy is the attempt to form through thinking universal principles and knowledge concerning how subjects ought to (if not must, by force of truth as a reality principle) think about themselves, others, and the surrounding world. As the universal is only manifest in the (sociocultural) particular, it is necessary to separate these domains, to piece together their specific causal powers in the formation of subjectivity and social reality, giving each their due, without reduction or a disciplinary-​theoretical bias to privilege one over the other. The problem here is manifold: what is universal cannot be confused

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Introduction 11 with what is cultural (and vice versa); what is cultural cannot be confused with what is idiosyncratic (and vice versa). Besides avoiding the epistemic pitfalls of biologism, culturalism, racism, sexism, etc., the DCR “conflation-​ free” framework avoids monadic individualism and structural determinism. It also avoids a simplistic “universalism” because most if not all human existential universals (agency, subjectivity, sex, death, nourishment, etc.) are only ever made manifest in the concrete of time and space. Thinking about thinking requires, nonetheless, the development of concepts and categories that abstract the day-​to-​day, lived experience of things, structures, processes, and mechanisms of both the natural and social worlds. Clifford Geertz points to the difference between “experience-​near” and “experience-​distant” concepts (1975, 47). The everyday lifeworld of what people “see, feel, think, imagine, and so on” is articulated in terms that are vernacular and experience-​near (ibid.). For social science, psychoanalytic theory, and philosophy, to “get hold of ” or “to map” what subjects are feeling, thinking, doing, etc. requires the development of an experience-​distant metalanguage with analytic power to reduce by abstraction the ideational content and forms of practice of everyday life. By analogy, grammarians speak of past participles, gerunds, and case grammar systems—​ all experience-​ distant concepts—​ while native speakers can use these grammatical forms effortlessly and unconsciously in the experience-​near, everyday use of language, without a whit of formal knowledge of the terms or their meaning. Likewise, The Subject of Human Being is roundly experience-​distant, and employs a broad spectrum of formal, philosophical, and psychoanalytical terms to grasp the underlying structures and totality of social reality. DCR employs a unique terminology because DCR breaks with and transcends the false dichotomies and sedimented meanings that have led anti-​realist philosophy into an epistemic and ontological cul-​de-​ sac. To offset the difficulty of absorbing the abstract and technical exegesis of theories of consciousness, agency, social forms, and subjectivity and their relations, I have attempted as much as possible to provide “experience-​near” vignettes and examples, because nothing this book has to say is not routinely, existentially, and universally exemplified in the “real world.” A realist account of human being cannot claim otherwise.

Notes 1 A note on diction and punctuation choices employed throughout this book: I have chosen to avoid problems with gendered pronouns by using “their” as an inclusive singular pronoun for subjective, objective, and possessive singular pronouns in avoidance of slightly clunky alternatives like “his/​her,” “he and she,” etc. However, I have not altered any of the different ways in which the authors I quote employ singular pronouns, including older texts, which use masculine pronouns as traditional “universal subjects.” In general, I use American English spellings, but have retained British English spellings in quotes or in references as found. I have added a serial

12

12 Introduction comma in lists or sequences that are quoted where none was present. In addition, I  use “scare quotes” frequently to indicate special, idiomatic, or wry usage, and often in close proximity to quoted material. Author quotes are differentiated by having a citation at the end of the sentence. 2 The qualification that objects and processes are relatively independent will be made clear in subsequent chapters. For now, the key is that “things in the world” (like human consciousness and agency) have an essential relation to “other things” that makes their constitution possible. This holds for “nonhuman” things as well, such as volcanoes and trees. 3 Perennial debates over the “truth value” of God (and lesser supernaturals: ghosts, demons, ancestor spirits, and so forth) are precisely an inquiry as to their causal powers in the world—​do supernaturals affect the living in love or malice? Did God or a “big bang” initiate the universe? While “God” as a causal power has declined in scientific explanations, other new forms of causal power have arisen. For instance, only in the last hundred years or so, with the Freudian turn, has the subconscious come into recognition as real, as influencing—​causally—​agent intentionality in terms of beliefs and desires. In the philosophy of the mind, debates continue as to whether the “mind” has an emergent causal power above and beyond the brain, or whether human consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon of neural processes (and hence fully determined). Nonetheless, and as will be discussed in chapter three, for John Searle, the question whether an entity is ontologically subjective or ontologically objective can take radical directions. Postmodern and poststructural thought typically argues not only that such things as God and “metanarratives” as subjective phenomena, but all objects of thought we may consider “scientific” or real, such as quantum mechanics, are in reality “ontologically subjective.” The Sokal hoax perpetrated against the journal Social Text demonstrated the dangers of unfettered adherence to this type of radical idealism. 4 My point here comes from Colin Wight’s argument that “The history of philosophy is replete with examples of philosophers, often self-​professed idealists, who are forced in one way or another to be realists about something: Plato about the forms; Hegel about Geist; Berkeley about God; Hume about his own skepticism and sensations; Nietzsche about will to power; Derrida about the text” (2006, 26). 5 There is a third, hybrid alternative, what Margaret Archer terms elisionist or conflationist ontology. Conflationism attempts to avoid the issue of reductionism—​ to either agents or structures—​by collapsing them into a singular moment of expression. This move results in ontological fuzziness (likely by design): neither agency nor structure is clearly delineated and identifiable as the ontological source of social (re) production. Ultimately, conflationism is an idealist account of the agent-​structure problem, because structural elements to any practice are only “realized” in terms of knowledge agents have of the structural conditions pertinent to their practice. I will be discussing conflationism, ontological individualism, and ontological structuralism in more detail in chapter six, “The Subject of Structure.” 6 Thirty unique capacities are proposed by Christian Smith (2010, 54). For practical reasons and philosophical focus I will be concentrating on human capacities revolving around the arch-​capacity of reflexive deliberation, highlighted in chapter four, “The Ontology of Subjectivity.”

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Introduction 13

Bibliography Geertz, Clifford. 1975. “On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.” Scientific American, 63: 47–​53. Smith, Christian. 2010. What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wight, Colin. 2006. Agents, Structures, and International Relations:  Politics as Ontology. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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2  Philosophical materialism

Introduction The concept of a “realist philosophical ontology” is a mouthful, as is the general orientation of “philosophical materialism,” which forms the backbone for the following chapters in this book. What these terms convey, however, is the essence and foundation of “dialectical critical realist” (DCR) philosophy and social theory. To be a philosophical realist is to recognize there is a domain of “things” in the world whose existence is ontologically independent of human beings. In virtue of this philosophical “metatheory,” to be a social theory realist is to recognize that preexisting and enduring social forms have powers to condition (but not fully determine) the lives of subject-​agents in their day-​ to-​day lives. To be a philosophical materialist is to accept three interlocking principles:  epistemological materialism, ontological materialism, and practical materialism.1 These three principles affirm irreducible ontologies of knowledge about the world, the material reality of the world, and human praxis in the world. They form the basis of “basic critical realism” and set the stage for Bhaskar’s subsequent development of DCR through the addition of temporality, determinate absence, and change—​enlarging a realist conception of being to include processes of becoming. These principles also affirm the possibility for philosophy, as a capacity for “thinking about thinking” or “critical rational thinking” about the nature of the world (ontology), knowledge claims made about the world (epistemology), and human conduct in the world (ethics). Philosophy is necessarily anthropocentric, as a metatheory of the relationships between the mind and the self, other, and world. While human beings are part of the world—​biochemical creatures subject to laws of nature—​the centrality of cognition, language, and meaning to the human condition gives rise to a referential detachment from the world, in the form of a second-​order “irony of consciousness.” While human beings have conscious awareness of their existence, they are simultaneously conscious of, and reflexive about, their awareness. The capacity to be reflexive on the foundations of existence in time, on the nothingness at the heart of consciousness, and material conditions of their lives belies the profound difficulty of accurate and authentic “meta-​awareness.” DCR provides a

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Philosophical materialism 15 philosophical metatheory, deeply obliged to the Western philosophical tradition, but critical of many of its assumptions and propositions because of a wholesale failure to give ontology its due. The two adversaries of philosophical materialism are “subjective idealism” and “reductive materialism.” Idealist philosophy is not a take on “high ideals” or “living in a fanciful world,” but is a vigorous and influential philosophical orientation with many advocates and forms in the history of ideas, all of which share a common precept that the fount of “reality” ultimately springs from an idea, held either by the divine or “Man” (in its latest manifestations, from language and/​or cultural categories). Reductive materialism, even more influential and legitimated within scientific circles, holds that reality at its highest levels is ultimately determined by mechanical operations at the ground level of particle physics, string theory, or some other master explanans. In this view, biology is “applied” chemistry, chemistry is applied physics, and “minds” are reduced to brain biochemistry under sway of “eliminative materialism” in the philosophy of mind. In the social realm, the scientific pursuit of determinative relationships by “tiny things” of “big things” informs the reductionist project to link individual and group behavior to natural selection and genetics, undertaken with zeal in behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, and sociobiology. On the contrary, DCR philosophical materialism transcends both “vulgar” idealist and materialist positions by recourse to a realist ontology. Concerning “idealism,” DCR does not dismiss the power of thinking as causally efficacious: subjects have beliefs and desires, reasons for action, and an array of projects informed by their ideals, values, and “truths.” Concerning “materialism,” DCR neither denies “wholes” are composed of “parts,” nor that scientific progress is largely due to identifying levels of reality and their operations by a reductive methodology. By a traverse, DCR bridges the powers of consciousness (and the ideational) and all levels of reality (physical, chemical, biological, psychological, social, etc.) by a paramount ontological claim, that of emergent powers materialism. “Emergence” transcends the perennial idealist-​reductive materialist dualism by establishing causality as the criterion of reality and vindicating the irreducibility of causal powers at all levels of reality. DCR non-​reductive realist ontology discerns generative mechanisms and structures which are causally responsible for a stratified reality, for both the “natural” and “social” worlds. Thus, chemistry is not applied physics, and psychology is not applied neuroscience. All strata of reality hold, sui generis, emergent powers, which it becomes the task of specific scientific disciplines to research and interdisciplinary projects to assimilate. In the social realm, the ontological point is that the sociocultural milieu—​embedded in specific geohistorical contexts in which the subject is enculturated—​preexists the subject. On the one hand, the material coordinates of existence (social structures, ideologies, language, material culture, built environments, etc.) exert a causal effect of conditioning on subject-​agents. On the other, human agency is predicated on emergent powers of consciousness, granting “subjects” an

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16  Philosophical materialism innate power of agency to deliberate and potentially transform their material coordinates. The attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of basic critical realism and its further dialectical elaboration in DCR is outside the scope of this book. Bhaskar has developed a “total philosophy,” covering ontology, epistemology, and ethics. His philosophical “major moves” revolutionize understanding of the human subject and surrounding world by their confrontation with and overcoming of major presuppositions (and “common sense” manifestations) of the Western philosophical tradition. They also mutually support and enrich one another and are necessary to understand the depth and breadth of Bhaskar’s grand project (and necessary to understand Bhaskar’s third phase of philosophical development—​metaReality—​unfairly maligned in my view, but not addressed in this book). Bhaskar’s lifetime task is difficult, brilliant, and complex, and almost impossible to encapsulate in a single chapter without ignoring key arguments, short-​shrifting others, all in all, “detotalizing” his system. As such, my methodology in this chapter is to select the vital points that support subsequent chapters on the interrelationships among consciousness, agency, subjectivity, and social forms. This chapter is long and was a challenge to write when so much more could be said. However, by the end, I hope to have unpacked the basics of what it means to be a dialectical critical realist, supposing a realist philosophical ontology of epistemic, ontological, and practical materialism, in service to a dialectics of human ethical progress, and to have made it palatable.

Epistemological materialism The first principle of philosophical materialism, as I will lay out, is the precept of epistemological materialism. DCR directly engages the question of ontology and asserts the possibility for the independent existence and transfactual (or universal) causal powers of the objects targeted by science. This stance directly confronts the epistemologies of positivism, postmodernism, hermeneutics, and social constructionism, which in general make the error of collapsing what there is (ontology) into a question of how we can know (epistemology), or in other words, an “epistemic fallacy.” For critical realism, there exists a gap between the world and knowledge of the world. This gap separates two domains of a human-​centered reality, namely, the transitive domain of knowledge and the intransitive domain of objects of knowledge. The intransitive domain contains the generative mechanisms and causal structures that operate independently of human existence and underlie the range of phenomena human beings experience, such as gravity, thermodynamics, the biological sphere shaped by evolutionary adaptation, and so on.2 Likewise, there exist intransitive objects of knowledge in the social world, which are the fount of the possibility for social inquiry and critique. The likely candidates in the social sphere qualifying as having ontological “reality” include the powers intrinsic to human agents, the enduring relations that constitute social structures, and the

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Philosophical materialism 17 symbolic frameworks, ideologies, and meanings existent in the cultural sphere. For the most part, intransitive objects of natural and sociocultural knowledge preexist human subjectivity and practice, which establishes such objects as holding temporal priority, relative autonomy, and constitutive powers vis-​à-​vis the human subject-​agent, and consequently forms the condition of possibility for natural and social science. The claim for an intransitive domain of reality (separate from knowledge claims about it) is a metatheoretical argument, whose foundational a priori claim is that generative mechanisms (causal structures) are ontologically real and responsible for the phenomena of events and entities. As a metatheory, it does not make any substantive claims as to which generative mechanisms do and do not exist. The task of identifying generative mechanisms is under the purview of specific scientific approaches (physics, biology, psychology, sociology, interdisciplinary study, and so forth). In other words, the claim of an intransitive domain of generative mechanisms and causal structures is a “philosophical ontology,” which should be distinguished from any substantive scientific ontological claims. While intransitive objects of knowledge are the ontological gold of human inquiry into the world, nonetheless, the world is apperceived through or mediated by transitive objects of knowledge. Transitive objects of knowledge are the antecedent collection of theories, facts, beliefs, symbolic frameworks, models, paradigms, methods, etc. that form the material base for further knowledge production. Human beings produce scientific knowledge for techno-​ scientific mastery and understanding of the world. As such, valuations are inherent to the process of knowledge production, considered as a social process.3 In formal contexts, scientific practice is preconditioned by study, training, institutional support, financial resources, and the degrees and accreditation required. As an entrenched process, connecting the interests and values of the state, universities, corporations, private foundations, and individual scientists, transitive knowledge production is conditional on and imbricated with the political, economic, and cultural base of its production. The transitivity of knowledge includes a recognition that human knowledge about the world is in principle incomplete because new discoveries and information will necessitate its reassessment. It also recognizes knowledge can be shot through with mistakes, lies, damned lies, and mystifications. Hence, DCR evokes the necessity of a critical stance toward knowledge production in its namesake. The status of knowledge is consequently beset on both sides of its epistemic center. On the one hand, the contour of scientific practice is shaped by its social coordinates—​such that knowledge is socially relative. This fact, however, does not entail that intransitive objects are phantasmagorical fictions imposed as the “objective world.” On the other hand, scientific practice is defined by its drive to conceptual harmony between “truth bearers” of knowledge and “truth makers” of the world—​such that knowledge is ontologically relative. This fact, however, does not entail intransitive objects bestow their objective nature as concepts and theories, “ready-​made.” The gap between

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18  Philosophical materialism the intransitive and transitive domains ensures that epistemological (and methodological) concerns do not dominate scientific inquiry, deciding a priori what can be known, thought, or investigated. For DCR, the relativity of knowledge production necessitates understanding the scientific process as an inherently “fallibilist enterprise,” performing a continual reassessment of the facticity of any scientific claims about the intransitive domain. The history of science abounds with causal paradigms and mechanisms considered no more: phlogiston, phrenology, scientific racism, etc. On the contrary, by recognizing the distinction between the intransitive and transitive domains of knowledge, DCR overturns the two dominant approaches to knowledge production in Western philosophy, both of which attempt to eliminate the relativity of knowledge in its justification by either (1)  collapsing the world into the mind, such as by positing Kantian-​like transcendental categories of the mind—​the error of idealism, or (2)  collapsing the mind into the world such that knowledge is only of atomistic entities, sometimes linked by constant conjunctions at the human experiential level of phenomena—​the error of empiricism. A third approach, loosely clustering around the flag of postmodernism, is characterized as an immanent version of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Instead, however, of universal transcendental categories, the mind’s grid of intelligibility is formed by categories embedded in time and place (history and culture), which “subjects” the mind to the contingencies of local experience. Immanent idealists posit various mediating “conceptual formations” between mind and world that circumscribe how the world is represented (as a causal modality) and suggestions as to what world is represented (social power, enframement, cultural particularity, etc.). These formations give only displaced and perspectival constructions of reality, whose veracity to the world is irrelevant according to their logic. If not “world veracity,” the idealist logic tends toward instituting, on the bright side, respect for cultural difference, and on the dark side, skepticism, solipsism, and nihilism. Examples of conceptual formations include “collective representations” for Durkheim, “language” for Wittgenstein, “discourse” for Foucault, “text” for Derrida, and “signifier” for Baudrillard. DCR rejects all three approaches because they privilege epistemology over ontology, commit the epistemic fallacy, and consequently disavow the possibility for fallibilist knowledge of an objective world. On the contrary, for DCR, the justification for “truth lies in the objective world, which knowledge contingently accesses, not the subjective world, where knowing comes illicitly to ground the world it knows” (Norrie 2010, 179). DCR speculates, at the level of a philosophical ontology, the world contains such things as: entities, structurata, generative mechanisms, and causal structures; and, more specifically, within the social world:  “structures, systems, processes, wholes, agency, social structure, social relations, ideologies, [and consciousness],” all identified and declared “real” by their causal powers (Bhaskar 2007, 198).

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Philosophical materialism 19

Ontological materialism The ontological turn in philosophy of science and social science begins with a basic supposition that in order for knowledge to be possible, some-​“thing” must be true. In order for science to be possible, and to avoid the epistemic fallacies of idealism and empiricism, the sciences must be grounded by an explicit ontology about their subject matter. Ontology, the study of “being” and theories of its nature, is inescapable. Philosophical and scientific conjecturing that seeks to avoid the “ontological question” by recourse to strict methodological and/​ or epistemological frameworks smuggles ontological precepts into its knowledge production. Even the most scientific, “metaphysically neutral,” i.e. “objective,” experiment relies on an untheorized ontological base, including processes and entities of “event,” “perceiver,” “causation,” and “closed experimental conditions,” all of which bootleg tacit assumptions about the nature of reality—​of “knowers” and the “known.”4 Anything necessary to discovering a truth of the world through human experience and knowledge production, including the nature of “truth” itself, entails ontological commitments. DCR is not claiming that a “realist” science, happily embracing ontology, would discover a different world than the one so far discovered by modern science. DCR is claiming the disapprobation toward ontology is a fundamental error, whose origin in the rationalist-​empiricist debate within modern philosophy between the Kantian and Humean poles set an “epistemological turn” into motion and remains a dead weight on philosophy and thought. By advancing an “ontological turn,” DCR seeks to make explicit what hitherto has been implicit, and to return ontology to its rightful preeminence. Doing so, in light of the intransitive-​transitive distinction, puts epistemology in its place as a process by which reality is known, not as the ultimate arbiter of what is known, because ontological features of the world dictate what is true as reality. Moreover, in the humanities and social sciences, the ontological question is even more important because without grounding in ontological realism, empiricist and idealist epistemologies presently in ascension succumb to volunteerism and social constructionism. The purpose of cordoning off the transitive from the intransitive is to highlight that knowledge production is a social process and is incomplete and fallible. “Truth” is always transient and subject to reassessment. In addition, DCR is inherently skeptical of observer-​neutral languages to describe the world, “God’s eye” vantage points to ascertain reality, and “rationality” freed from social context and personal perspective.5 Despite the epistemic relativity of knowledge to social context, the “reality principle” ultimately predisposes knowledge claims to abide by its truth conditions. What is real cannot be magically altered, nor is it linguistically constituted or conceptually composed. Ontological features of the world always remain outside of knowledge of the world, and thus enable the third component of the “holy trinity” of DCR, the possibility for judgmental rationality when assessing substantive theories, claims, arguments, models, etc. of

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20  Philosophical materialism reality. In principle, competing claims about the natural and social worlds can be arbitrated and judged better or worse, true or false, right or wrong. If “truth” is a status conferred on knowledge, always open to audit and revision, “truth claims” are explicitly “judgmental” on the one hand and yet justified by congruent experiments, observations, statistical analyses, textual explications, etc., and inductive, deductive, and retroductive forms of reasoning on the other. Certainty may be hard to come by, but no intrinsic limit is set by human minds, technology, or (antiquated) philosophical systems. If a limit is encountered, if uncertainty, skepticism, and doubt arise, the history of thought is replete with flawed attempts to extrapolate larger “truths” to overcome the gaps and holes of unknowing. The global castings of religion fill space and time with anthropocentric significance (why are we here? What happens after death? How ought one live?). The “God” concept has vouchsafed reality and knowledge in many philosophical systems (Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Descartes, Kant, Locke) and is why Nietzschean genealogy and its heirs fall into perspectivalism:  the politics of particle physics, the androcentrism of Newtonian physics, and so on. Without recourse to ontology, epistemic claims become self-​referential and incommensurable with one another. Knowledge is pluralized, and in the most radical formulation, knowledge is theorized as a convenient “viewpoint” in service to hegemonic relations of social power. Judgment, in this view, becomes not about truth, but control.

“It’s the real thing”: causality as the criterion for reality Central to DCR philosophical ontology, the truth of what is “real” is grounded in a causal powers criterion of reality. The criterion applies universally to both the natural and social worlds and identifies generative mechanisms and causal structures as two general forms of causality. The criterion is generated by a transcendental deduction to an independent reality, as the necessary precondition for science and knowledge of the world. Causality as the paramount ontological feature of reality supplants the “conjunctionitis” of Humean empiricism and reintroduces questions pertaining to the “essential” nature of things in the world. The foremost implication of the causal criterion is that causality is a property of things. Bhaskar states: The world consists of things, not events. Most things are complex objects, in virtue of which they possess an ensemble of tendencies, liabilities and powers. It is by reference to the exercise of their tendencies, liabilities, and power that the phenomena of the world are explained. (2008a, 51) For DCR, the relationship of “things” (substances, entities, structurata, etc.) to their powers (dispositions, capacities, liabilities, etc.) is characterized as a natural necessity. Categorical properties of some thing, for example, the atomic structure of copper, give rise to naturally necessary dispositions of

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Philosophical materialism 21 “malleability, fusibility, ductility, electric conductivity” (Harré and Madden 1975, 12). The form of natural necessity operative in the US Navy revolves around its ten “carrier strike groups,” whose super-​carrier centerpieces are an essential mechanism by which the US projects power throughout the world. The destructive capacity of carrier strike groups is their power, and the mere threat of unleashing a torrent of fighter-​bombers and cruise missiles is often sufficient to advance US geopolitical interests. The explication of natural necessity achieves knowledge of the natural and social worlds. The importance of natural necessity as a concept and ontological feature of the world cannot be overstated. It supports the DCR positions on causality, depth ontology, and emergence; the latter two will be discussed below. However elementary the return to an analysis of “things” and their “powers” as the argument for an independent reality may seem, it is a tipping point by which DCR justifies “reality” as a truth, existing independently of human knowledge about reality. This formulation of what is real is “vindicated not as providing a set of necessary truths about a mysterious underlying physical realm, but as providing a set of conditionally necessary truths about our ordinary world as investigated by science” (Bhaskar 2008a, 52). DCR philosophical ontology takes the high ground, holding to a transcendental realism about what must exist as a general form, under which lie all specific forms of causality responsible for the manifest world. It remains the task of the substantive sciences, consequently, to discover the nature of specific mechanisms in operation.

Ontology is deep stuff: the real, actual, and empirical As noted above, the intransitive/​transitive distinction revalidates ontological considerations by separating ontology from epistemology. The separation involves referential detachment of the socially inscribed act of reference from the referent. A realist ontology resting on “existential intransitivity is a presupposition of discourse which must be about something other than itself, of praxis which must be with something other than itself or of desire which must be for something alterior to itself ” (Bhaskar 2008b, 212, italics Bhaskar’s). The detachment of referents is necessary for thinking, knowing, desiring, saying, making, and doing. The dialectics of this essential dualism partitions the emergence of the transitive from intransitive, while recognizing the former is conditioned by the latter. For one, ontology is “inexorable” because, as Bhaskar (2007, 198) notes, “it is impossible to talk about a known world, one can’t talk about objects of knowledge, without presupposing a certain way of being, an ontology of the world known.” Second, ontology is “all-​inclusive,” viz., “beliefs must be included in ontology, knowledge must be embedded in being” (ibid.). While knowledge is one facet in the larger constellation of being, the ontological turn to causality as the mark of reality reworks our knowledge of the human condition characterized by its double enclosure in the “brute world”

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22  Philosophical materialism of entities, events, processes, etc. and in the “known world” of categories, concepts, and theories. What is “brute” and what is “known,” however, are not exhaustive of reality. The causal criterion adds a crucial third dimension (as three “classes of what exists”), rounding out the DCR claim for a depth ontology consisting of the empirical, the actual, and the real (Elder-​Vass 2007, 167). First, the empirical is the domain of human phenomenal experience of the world via the five senses. Human life is predicated on experience to interact with the environment as knowers and doers in a world revolving around them. The second class, the actual, is the manifest world of entities, events, and processes. All features of the world, its flora, fauna, geography, and sociocultural contexts, are manifestations of causal powers in operation. Third, the real identifies the underlying generative mechanisms and causal structures responsible for the actual phenomena of the world. The real is defined by the causal criterion validating potential objects of knowledge, which are responsible for generating phenomena, states of affairs, and happenings of what is actual. For Bhaskar, “these objects are neither phenomena (empiricism) nor human constructs imposed upon the phenomena (idealism), but real structures which endure and operate independently of our knowledge, our experience and the conditions which allow us access to them” (2008a, 25). The real is thus the master domain: causal mechanisms make possible the domain of the actual world of processes, events, and entities, and make possible human experience of being a “knower” of the “known,” empirical world. The actual and real features of the universe, world, and human existence are consequently the target of conceptual and theoretical development. From divining rain to identifying footprints, colliding nucleons in accelerators, or pondering “does it all mean something?!”, human subjects confront a world of manifest actualities that invite deeper appreciation. To pierce through the unknown to the “real” by philosophical cogitation and scientific investigation is to establish the generative mechanisms and structures that are causally responsible for the actual and known via human cognition. Generative mechanisms and structures operating at the level of the real, however, may or may not manifest into events. Their powers and liabilities remain transfactually operative until actualized (and potentially experienced). The natural and social worlds are open systems with multiple co-​determinations and countervailing powers always in potentia by virtue of the natural necessity of things; the actuality of an event is conditioned by its relations (and hence is dialectical) with other causal powers. The three classes of reality are distinct from one another and, consequently, are often out of phase with one another. Events occur frequently without a human perceiver to experience (a tree falling in the woods does make a sound). Generative mechanisms may not produce events they govern due to countervailing mechanisms. Gravity pulls, but the barn will not collapse until the support beams rot out. The polar caps remain frozen in place, but the seas will not rise until temperatures get too warm. Structural conditions for revolutionary political upheaval may be present for years until a minute tipping point unleashes hitherto latent political dissatisfaction.6

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Philosophical materialism 23

A world stratified: turtles all the way down? DCR concepts of the real, natural necessity, and the causal powers criterion of reality are transcendental categories that define basic ontological features of the intransitive domain. The “realization” of causality as it manifests in the actual world, however, does not imply the “real” is located on a single plain or as a “flat ontology.” The immanent and “actual” world, embedded in space and time, is stratified by levels of irreducible entities, structures, and structurata that wield specific forms of causality, capacities, liabilities, etc.7 Emergent, higher-​level powers are grounded in lower levels but not reducible to them. The world is consequently a laminate, whereby higher-​order entities are composed and conditioned by lower-​level entities, which science (so far!) has identified in groupings such as subatomic, atomic, molecular, cellular, biological, psychological, and social forms of being. The ontological stratification of reality is mirrored by an epistemological division of labor to elaborate the mechanisms, entities, substances, etc., sui generis to each stratum: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and the social sciences. DCR is committed to a strong antinominalism, rejecting the poststructuralist and idealist claim that all classificatory systems are cognitive/​cultural/​discursive constructions. At each stratum, ontological features, arising from their structural constitution by lower-​level strata, manifest from the real into the actual and are discovered (empirically) through scientific methods and the application of microscopic, macroscopic, and telescopic procedures. The laws of matter in motion through time and space discovered by the study of physics give basic parameters for all matter. Chemistry is the scientific inquiry into the properties, structure, and transformation of matter through their interaction. “Higher-​ order” sciences such as biology and geology presuppose and are conditioned by physical and chemical properties, all of which combine into multidisciplinary scientific enterprises to study complex features of earth such as climatology, oceanography, and ecology. In a similar fashion, while human sciences such as psychology and sociology identify, classify, and explain mental states and behavior at individual and social levels, they presuppose physiological and biological properties of humankind, themselves constituted by cellular and molecular structures, and under governance by the laws of chemistry and physics. All in all, the natural and human sciences have disclosed a world that is characterized by the essential difference of qualities, properties, and features for each stratum. These strata are trans-​contextual in their potential effects and singular as to their natures and powers. It is through an analysis of events and manifestations of reality in the actual in terms of “underlying structures and other mechanisms which generate them” that understanding and explanation are derived (Norrie 2010, 7). The proposition of intransitive objects of social theory—​consciousness, agency, subjectivity, and social forms—​as viable units of analysis necessitates their existence to be ontologically grounded as emergent strata and holding different types of causal powers. At the same time, while irreducible to the lower levels, these

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24  Philosophical materialism intransitive objects are grounded in and “set in place” by the psychological, biological, molecular, etc. underpinnings of them. The “real” is thus the realm underlying the actual (and empirical), and it designates the causal powers and mechanisms that are responsible for concrete entities, events, and structures as they manifest at different strata. Despite their universal or relative enduring transfactuality, these powers do not necessarily manifest in the actual; the real cannot “self-​cause” its own actualization. Tendencies or capacities such as solubility, conductivity, and gravitational pull are exercised in conditions independent of the causal power in question.8 The concept of the real, therefore, does not include descriptions or explanations of the conditions under which these powers manifest. These conditions, or counterfactuals, are salient because reality is an open system, and thus, counterfactual conditionals are necessary in order for real mechanisms to manifest the actual. DCR stresses that scientific experimentation seeks to disclose strict counterfactuals, viz., transfactualities by isolating causal powers and categorical properties in closed systems (e.g., using a test tube, vacuum chamber, or distilled water) that remove extraneous conditions affecting the causal process or categorical expression in question. In the open, however, whether or not counterfactuals present themselves is contingent on having the “right conditions” in place. At the molecular and physical levels, salt is soluble, but it needs water to actually dissolve; copper is conductive, but it needs an electric current to actually conduce; gravity attracts, but it needs two masses to actually pull. Sayer exemplifies the point further in consideration of the nature of gunpowder, which “has the ‘causal power’ to explode in virtue of its unstable chemical structure” (1998, 124). Whether or not gunpowder (e.g., in a pipe bomb) ever explodes is dependent on contingent conditions that are independent of the inherent capacity; in this case, human intentions and a struck match are likely suspects responsible. The explosion of gunpowder thus is never predetermined. Under certain (counterfactual) conditions, however, gunpowder will explode necessarily because it has been fully determined. The transfactual power to explode is actualized by counterfactual conditions enabling it to explode. The same holds true at the level of social forms: the control mechanisms to protect nation-​state borders are not activated unless aliens cross the line;9 the theory of supply-​side economics is not effectuated until corporate taxes are reduced; and even for human sexuality, desire is ever present, but increasingly requires Tinder to find a date.

Abstract and concrete powers: being actualized is more than a cliché The relationship between the real and the actual can be productively developed through an engagement with, and transposition into, the dialectical distinction between the abstract and the concrete. Sayer’s work (1998, 120–​43) to cross-​ pollinate the two frameworks is valuable because it clarifies insights of both, and in service to social ontology provides a robust methodology to analyze

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Philosophical materialism 25 social phenomena in terms of their constitution and historical emergence. The ontological distinction between the abstract and the concrete exposes in formal terms the constitutive relationship between natural necessities and contingent conditions involved in the manifestation of the real in the actual. The distinction bears on the fact “the concrete [is] a unity of diverse determinations,” being a structure of internally related constituents that synthesize into a higher order entity (or structuratum), event, or process with their own emergent causal dispositions and liabilities (ibid., 127). Theories and concepts formulated about the world must account for both the natural necessity of powers (what is abstract) and the particular conditions by which they manifest (what is concrete). As argued above, whether or not natural necessities of the real (as a combination of abstract powers and properties) manifest into the actual is ultimately contingent because: [The] form of the combination is contingent [as neither necessary nor impossible], and therefore only determinable through empirical research. As such, its form cannot be assumed to have already been “taken up” into the theoretical framework in the same way that the nature of the abstract can. (Ibid., italics Sayer’s) In other words, the abstract is always internal to a concept or theory of the concrete (the unstable, explosive nature of gunpowder), but the conditions necessary for an explosion always remain external and contingent (the explosion remains undetermined until an intention and flame light the bomb). Abstractions thus identify causal powers and liabilities that are derived from necessary (internal) structural relations that transmit their powers into a higher level or concrete expression. For instance, in the abstract, the internal relation between masters and slaves is necessary for the constitution of each relatum. Actual instances of “slavery” as a set of concepts and practices manifest as unique social institutions in different historical contexts. As a “synthesis” of various determinations, “concrete slavery” will display different “styles” or “modes” (and accounts for the particular approaches of Spartacus, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Frederick Douglass, for instance, in their rebellion). Thus, in appreciation of the concrete, the necessary determinations (being all the conditions of possibility in play) presuppose but do not axiomatically entail concrete manifestations. In this way, dispositions and powers of the real may remain unactualized or latent because conditions under which the powers might arise are not favorable or nonexistent. Conditions in the most “abstract sense,” to repeat, thus provide either enablement or constraint, the latter understood as the effect of countervailing powers sufficient to suppress the manifestation of the real. The architecture of a (successful) building or bridge expressly countervails the effect of gravity, until the entropy of rot and rust finally enables the power of gravity (unconstrained) to actualize a debris heap. Resistance to slavery might exist unexpressed or passively until a tipping point calls forth an insurrection.

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26  Philosophical materialism The real-​ actual/​ abstract-​ concrete dyads challenge the “atomistic worldview” and its flat ontology, which renders all of reality into discrete, singular entities and processes. “Atoms” are self-​contained, holding only external relationships to other “atoms.” Relationships in an atomized reality are empirical regularities and display only constant conjunctions of cause and effect and their successions. In this view, entities and processes—​identified by the “thinginess” of nouns, such as deciduous trees, sunshine, CO2, rain, topsoil, and the tilt of the earth, are independent and analyzed in their own sui generis terms. DCR on the contrary seeks to model the dialectics of internal and external relations to transcend the hegemony of mere appearances, and to examine the deep architectural structures and causal mechanisms responsible for the variegated, textured, and profoundly synthetic nature of reality. The dialectics of the meanest hackberry tree resolve the miraculous cycle of earthbound biogenesis, built on asymmetrical relations of one-​sided dependency and symmetrical relations of mutual constitution. The hackberry is, on the one hand, asymmetrically dependent on four “necessary abstractions”: sun, rain, CO2, and seasonal change. The relationship is asymmetrical because the abstract necessities are not sustained by trees for their existence. On the other hand, the tree and microbiological constituents of topsoil have, to a relative degree, interdependent relations of mutual constitution. Trees need rich topsoil; topsoil needs healthy microorganisms; microorganisms need oxygen and plentiful carbon-​based materials to consume; the carbon-​capturing capacity of trees generates oxygen and leaves, branches, and eventually the entire tree, which decompose to become enriched topsoil. The necessary abstractions presupposed in any tree, however, are only manifested in concrete, geohistorical instantiations of actual trees.10 Trees in the concrete, their unique life histories driven by an intrinsic impulse to flourish through their life cycle in time and place, thus engender liabilities to contingencies pertaining to local conditions or any other condition configured to exert forms of power over the tree, an axiom pertaining to the nature of open systems and, crucially, whose contingent effects are not accessible to a priori conceptualization. Trees face the ever-​present threat of fire, pestilence, and floods, but their fates too can be determined by human decisions made miles away:  their safe encasement in parks or their classification as private property ready to be harvested. What is true for the hackberry is true across the natural and social sciences, unified by DCR adherence to philosophical naturalism pertaining to the stratification of nature, a depth ontology of causal structures and generative mechanisms, and the intransitivity of being contra the transitivity of knowledge. While abstract necessities of a hackberry derive from strata of the natural world—​physics chemistry, biology, ecology, etc.—​and are contingently inflected by its concreteness, social phenomena likewise are grounded in the biochemical and physiological orders of the natural world by virtue of human agents, yet involve the higher emergent strata of psychological capacities and enduring social forms. Sayer provides a historical materialist analysis of capitalism that is sensitive to the relation of abstract necessities to concrete forms

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Philosophical materialism 27 (ibid., 129). In a slightly altered version of Sayer’s model, in the abstract, capitalism synthesizes human needs and desires (for food, shelter, clothes, Rolex watches, Tesla Roadsters, etc.); modalities of production and distribution to fulfill these needs (finance capitalism, industrialism, “post-​Fordist” manufacturing, “big box” stores/​e-​commerce, container shipping, etc.); physical capital (energy, natural resources, machines, technology, etc.); commodities (pizzas, beer, McMansions, Air Jordans, etc.); economic laws (supply and demand, diminishing marginal utility, comparative advantage, etc.); social relations (investment-​income earners/​wage-​income earners, balance of trade, northern hemisphere/​southern hemisphere, gendered labor positions, producer-​consumer, etc.); political economy (neoliberalism, conditions set by the state—​taxation, legal and policy environment, etc.); and cultural forms (meanings, values, and practices of consumer culture, e.g., “Black Friday” shopping, “lifestyle” marketing, consumption as identity). This analytical breakdown of capitalism models how to conceptualize the structural and historical features of “capitalism” whereby abstract necessities and tendencies synthesize with contingent conditions at geohistorical conjunctures to produce actual businesses, banks, transportation networks, and the concepts and practices associated with consumerism. Even the simple act of buying a gallon of milk at the market hosts a complex and historically deep foundation of abstract necessities, holding internal relations with their surface expression. These necessities are identified as foundational assumptions (or givens), historical antecedents, social-​structural regularities, and causal mechanisms, which all bear directly on empirically recognized manifestations of a subject-​object in a structured relation to whatever contingent conditions inflect its expression. Whether the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the “great recession of 2008,” or the rise of “The Donald” in American politics in 2015, in each instance, the retroduction of pertinent abstract necessities helps to develop new concepts and rich theoretical constructions to understand the emergence and significance of the research topic in its open field (with the cases above, grounding ultimately in primal human concerns, of course being sex, money, and power). Without attention to the interplay of determinations and contingencies in an open system, such a failure enables misleading a priori paradigms, such as reductionism (morality is a product of evolution), structural determination (gender identity is a product of discourse), or ludic postmodern contingency and indeterminacy (we are artists of our own soul, palette of signifiers in hand). The essential realist point is that the search for explanations goes far beyond the search for empirical regularities in patterns of events, with the logical form of “if X, Y follows.” The DCR pursuit of “rational abstractions” helps to understand the necessity of regularities and to “map” the intrinsic, sui generis causal powers of natural necessities responsible for reality (Sayer 1998, 128, 125). It is evident, and entailed by the dialectical approach to the real, that multidisciplinary research and interdisciplinary theoretical development are required to incorporate both abstract necessities and empirical

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28  Philosophical materialism investigation of the actuality under question. The natural and social sciences identify and study relatively bounded domains construed by laws, theories, and concepts appropriate to their disciplinary mandate. Reality in its concrete forms, however, as a laminate—​or perhaps better envisioned as a “coaxial” model of nesting (like a Matryoshka doll)—​of higher and lower orders of reality cuts across these domains by necessity. In sum, conferred by the causal criterion, the irreducibility of causal powers and mechanisms drawn from multiple strata of reality operate in an open totality, whose external relations with other structures and mechanisms become contingent elements of emergent entities and processes, and are only ascertained a posteriori (or after the fact). Dispositions and mechanisms are always conditioned by the environment, context, or system they participate within, which constrains, modifies, or enables their particular manifestations in the actual. Moreover, because the concrete is a synthesis of determinations, and the world is an open system, the consequence is that future states of entities and processes remain undetermined until both the abstract and concrete particulars “work out” their synthesis to determine fully the present and future. In addition, by their combination, the synthesis of abstract and concrete determinations can alter the constituents. For example, when governments seek to improve public education via teacher performance using student test scores to assess effectivity, the unintended consequence is “teaching to the test,” undermining the original intention to remove bad teachers and reform bad schools, yet simultaneously altering student-​teacher relationships and educational values. In this case, by shifting the expectations and practices of teachers, students, and parents, new conditions alter preexisting concrete realities to generate new emergent social phenomena.

Emergence: moving beyond the reductionist-​dualist dilemma So far in this chapter, the ontological premise of emergence has been adumbrated but not explicitly theorized. DCR philosophical ontology is premised on two central features of the world, the causal powers criterion of reality and the theory of emergence. The two, in tandem, provide defense for the DCR claim that reality is composed of stratified levels—​from lower to higher—​each with sui generis and irreducible causal powers in terms of natural necessity. Emergence is also responsible for the DCR notion of the “actual,” manifesting entities, events, processes, etc., which reveals that “emergence” has two forms: its historic dimension (diachronic emergence) and constitutive dimension (synchronic emergence). In elemental terms, the concept of emergence evinces an intimate relationship between an emergence basis and an emergent, in which the emergence basis entails the development or appearance of an emergent. Synchronic emergence pertains to the composition and construction of new entities. For example, if water is a higher-​order, emergent property, its emergence basis is composed of a lower order of the atoms hydrogen and oxygen, forming H2O. Diachronic emergence pertains

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Philosophical materialism 29 to historical events, like new species, eruptions, wars, and technologies. In these cases, the emergence basis is the complex of antecedent conditions and entities, whose interplay thus coalesces into emergent events. For this discussion of the nature of emergence, I employ the work of a contemporary theorist of emergence, Olivier Sartenaer, who, while not an explicit critical realist, nonetheless provides a robust and realist account of emergence, wholly amenable to DCR philosophical precepts. To this point, Sartenaer argues “emergence is an empirical relation that reconciles two features that seems prima facie to be in tension” (2015a, 2). In the relationship between an emergent and its emergence basis, an emergent is both “dependent on” and yet “autonomous from its emergence basis” (ibid.). Springing from this same tension are the two competing strategies to come to terms with the complexity of reality. As we will see, both strategies have fatal problems, ones that only a theory of emergence can overcome. On the one hand, the dependence of higher forms and their powers on lower-​level base structures of parts suggests a reductive analysis could explain forms entirely by their bases, rendering higher levels as secondary or epiphenomenal qualities with no distinct powers or properties above their bases because they are identical. On the other, the sense that higher forms are autonomous from their bases suggests they are not only non-​reducible and “real phenomena” with distinct properties and powers, but radically discontinuous from their bases, non-​identical, and thus ontologically dualistic in nature. Emergence, in Sartenaer’s view, “broadly construed” is “the orderly advance, through time, of natural events” and the emergence of entities in the world such as “quarks, atoms, cells, organs, individuals, populations, galaxies, etc.” (2015b, 64–​65). Sartenaer’s criterion for emergence, which justifies it as an ontological feature of the world, is a materialist account of “qualitative novelty” that resolves the tension and transcends the reductionist/​dualist solutions (2015a, 2). On the one hand, reductionism stresses the dependency of higher orders on lower ones, and proposes that all features, properties, and powers of the higher can be fully explained or reduced to more fundamental levels, casting higher orders as epiphenomenal of lower. The strongest version, “material monist” eliminative reductionism, proposes that all of reality can be ultimately reduced and explained by knowledge of “smaller parts,” leading to a regress by which all of reality could be explained by reference to particle physics, or at some deeper, super-​subatomic level, possibly unknown at present. On the other, dualism stresses the autonomy of higher orders from lower ones, and proposes that the properties and powers of the higher cannot be fully explained or reduced to more fundamental levels because there is a “discontinuity” between levels. The strongest version, “substance dualism,” proposes there are two fundamental substances in the world: inanimate material and human consciousness (also known as mind-​body dualism, and a central precept of many religions, which evoke a “spirit in the material world”). Both reductionism and dualism grasp strong intuitions. For the reductionist, wholes are made of parts, themselves often made of smaller parts, and

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30  Philosophical materialism by understanding the parts a scientist can understand the whole by the breakdown. For the dualist, wholes have properties and powers that are somehow “over and above” the nature(s) and configuration of their parts, such as liquidity, solidity, and human consciousness. Substance dualism asserts there is a complete separation between biology and consciousness, and proposes mind and material are completely different substances. Weaker (more scientific) versions of dualism also seek to explain novelty and how complexity can arise from simpler forms, as with “property dualism” (the physical world can manifest either “physical properties” or “mental properties”) and Sartenaer’s example of “saltationism” (the evolutionary theory that “biological change can occur as a result of saltations, or sudden and discontinuous alterations”) (ibid., 64). Emergence transcends the distinction, sublating both intuitions, while jettisoning their respective errors. Emergence is thus an ontological position of non-​reductionist material monism—​smaller parts form larger wholes or structured levels, whose intra-​level relationships account for novel emergent properties and powers Substance dualism is eliminated as a matter of course: the notion of consciousness as a separate substance beyond or outside the vicissitudes of the “natural world” violates the laws of physics, and neuroscience continues to hack into the brain, having identified many of the mechanisms and substrate operations responsible for cognition (though much work remains, especially concerning consciousness as a phenomenon, an issue I will address in the next chapter, “The ontology of consciousness”). In addition, the weaker versions of dualism also falter because of “the requirement of discontinuity [such that] new entities are heterogeneous to the substrate from which they have appeared” (Sartenaer 2015b, 64; cf. John Searle’s critique of property dualism in chapter three, endnote four). The natural sciences and the nature of social structures suggest there is nothing absolutely discontinuous about compositional relations between lower and higher levels of reality and through processes of change. Molecules are composed of atoms; the structure of the hippocampus is composed of neurons; Starbucks has over 22,000 stores, 180,000 employees, and 60 million weekly customers; the structured distribution of wealth in a society arises from the distribution of wage-​and investment-​income among its members; and for events like World War I  and the end of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989–​91, sociopolitical-​economic causal antecedents often run decades in advance. Despite the dualist intuition, any mystery revolves around the precise causes that prompted the initial “emergence” of higher levels and qualitative novelties:  how did the biological stratum of reality emerge? How did human consciousness emerge? Whatever answers are found to these seeming mysteries, the answers will ground out in ontological terms without recourse to theories involving different substances and properties or radical discontinuity. Against material monist reductionism, the argument is more difficult because (1)  emergent evolutionism accepts that entities can be analyzed in terms of their emergence bases: wholes do have parts, and scientific analysis in

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Philosophical materialism 31 many ways is a sustained effort to understand how parts work and to discover even smaller parts; and (2)  reductionism, like emergentism, rejects dualism and fully accepts the scientific materialist world view of immanence. For these reasons, an argument for emergence as a fundamental ontological feature of reality is explicitly an argument against eliminative reductionism as an ontological principle. The emergentist argument against the reductionist principle consists of two interrelated arguments. The first is for the non-​reducibility (or non-​identity) of emergent causal powers of entities and structures to lower-​ level operations or parts. The second is for the non-​explainability and thus non-​predictability of future emergent entities, events, and states.11 Moreover, as noted, emergence is one of the most fundamental philosophical precepts of DCR, without which its causal powers criterion of reality founders, and all effects become explainable only at a near zero point of ontological reduction. A theory of emergence, of foremost importance for the DCR philosophical anthropology, is the argument for a synchronically emergent causal power of human consciousness and as a corollary—​via diachronic emergence—​the future as open, existentially-​intransitively undetermined, which vindicates ontologically the possibility for personal and sociocultural transformation.

The theory of emergence Sartenaer argues the theory of emergence should be revalidated in the philosophy of science because it proposes a “third way” (2015b, 68) between reductionism and dualism, and can account faithfully to the supposed paradox that while all things are ontologically determined (all things clearly have an ontological basis or “cause”), it is a “well established…fact that there exist in nature…systems whose future behavior cannot be predicted, no matter how advanced or fined-​tune our cognitive and technical abilities” (ibid., 62).12 The underlying assumption that would connect “determinism” and “predictability” is that if all system-​states are determined, having knowledge of a present state ought to (in principle and, at some point, in practice) facilitate the prediction of future states because of axiomatic relations between cause and effect granted by scientific investigation. The possibility for system-​state predictability, to the contrary, has come under question both in practice and in principle. Sartenaer notes the debate over the in-​principle and/​or in-​practice “divorce between determinism and prediction” has been traditionally grounded in “chaos theory and quantum mechanics” (ibid.). Theories of chaotic systems and quantum-​state uncertainty have suggested at a minimum in-​practice limitations, and in stronger versions in-​principle limitations to their knowability, and as a consequence their predictability. Sartenaer is skeptical, however, that chaos theory and quantum mechanics actually undermine system-​state knowability in principle (for full discussion see ibid., 63–​66). And he relegates practical/​technical limitations as extrinsic (or philosophically marginal) to the larger ontological question over how to

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32  Philosophical materialism understand “in-​principle unpredictability” when reconciled with ontological determinism (ibid., 68). A  theory of emergence, Sartenaer proposes, can reconcile this paradox within the natural world by providing a philosophical ontology that is “conceptually distinct” from any in-​principle/​in-​practice implications of chaos theory and quantum mechanics (2015b, 66). This is so because emergence as an ontological thesis characterizes a more fundamental operation or mechanism responsible for reality. Even if “all natural systems could behave ‘classically’—​that is, not ‘chaotically’ as well as not ‘quantumly’ ” (and hence be knowable in principle, according to the theory)—​ the ontological determinism of the world would still remain unpredictable in principle (ibid.). For Sartenaer, the unpredictability of emergence is predicated on the qualitative novelty of emergents. An emergent novelty arises from a relationship between an emergence basis (e.g., elements of hydrogen and oxygen) and an emergent (H2O) such that “each time some pre-​existing materials aggregate in a certain way, a new mode of relatedness obtains that corresponds to an emergent. Such mode of relatedness did not exist, even ‘implicitly’ or ‘potentially’, within these preexisting materials” (ibid., 65, italics Sartenaer’s). Moreover, “the advent of emergents…is a brute empirical fact”: the “emergence law[s]‌” responsible for the development of a stratified reality from each basis B to emergent E are “non-​deducible from…the laws that govern the behavior of B,” and thusly, “ultimate” and “sui generis” in their potentiality for the emergence of E (or, in DCR terms, “brute emergence” is equivalent to the “natural necessity” of reality to exist, have properties, and have causal efficacy) (ibid., italics Sartenaer’s). In Sartenaer’s abstract example of “atoms” X and Y and “molecule” XY, the claim for genuine novelty (both synchronically and diachronically) by virtue of new relations among atomic parts (X and Y), constituting a new molecular structure (XY), undermines the possibility for system-​ predictability, because of the “impossibility to specify in advance what the nature and behavior of XY will turn out to be on the sole basis of information that pertains to the chemistry of X and Y” (ibid., 65, italics Sartenaer’s). The same logic applies to social events. If two individuals come into contact, there is no algorithm to predict what form the relationship will manifest based on individual specifications of their “implicit” biological, psychoanalytical, and sociological constitution: they may fall in love; they may try to kill one another.13 The properties of XY (or novel conjoined relata) are consequently a “brute fact,” or “naturally necessary” and unforeseeable in principle before the fact. Sartenaer argues that emergent novelties are characterized by “in-​principle unpredictability” (ibid., italics Sartenaer’s). This is so because of the claim within the theory of emergence for the “constitutive and etiological non-​ explainability” of synchronic and diachronic novelties, which precludes the possibility of prediction (Sartenaer 2015a, 1). The issue revolves around two fundamental antitheses Sartenaer contrasts:  ontological determinism

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Philosophical materialism 33 versus ontological indeterminism, and epistemic determinism versus epistemic indeterminism (2015a, 2015b, passim). For the ontological antithesis, Sartenaer argues the emergentist and reductionist paradigms both accept some general sense of ontological determination of states of the universe: that all entities, events, processes, etc. are “successive,” in that all forthcoming “states of a given system” are determined by previous states (ibid., 63). At first blush, this might suggest (wrongly, as I will discuss below) that if all states are in some sense causally determined, ontologically the world is fundamentally deterministic: all states were always predetermined to be what they are. Sartenaer argues ontological indeterminism is a position neither emergentists nor reductionists accept, whose most viable basis is given by “quantum mechanics” (2015a, 14). An indeterminate ontology defined by quantum indeterminacy can only work “if it makes sense to talk about the quantum world as being the place of objectively chancy events” and “to the extent that one is ready to adopt a controversial solution to the measurement problem, viz., by invoking the so-​called ‘collapse’ of the wave function” (ibid., italics Sartenaer’s). In addition, for the committed ontological indeterminist, the effects of quantum indeterminacy would have to percolate up from the quantum level and “infect” higher levels with some degree of indeterminacy. In the second antithesis, epistemic determinism is a principle of predictability. It holds that for an ontologically deterministic system, a “cognitive agent [can] determine the state of the system at any time t* [a future state] from complete knowledge of its state at t [present state]” (2015b, 63). Epistemic indeterminism is a principle of non-​explainability and non-​predictability, such that it is not possible to “precisely explain (etiologically) why every state of the system (or the universe) is to follow from one of its prior states” (Sartenaer 2015a, 12, italics Sartenaer’s). However, Sartenaer notes: Epistemic determinism entails ontological determinism but not vice versa. Equivalently, ontological indeterminism entails epistemic indeterminism but not vice versa. As a result, it is logically consistent to be committed to ontological determinism together with epistemic indeterminism, a view which is actually nothing more than diachronic emergentism [viz., the ontological and epistemological parameters of emergence]. (Ibid., footnote 7) In order to integrate Sartenaer’s argument with the DCR emergentist paradigm, Sartenaer’s concept of “ontological determinism” requires further clarification. In addition, a theory of emergence requires an explicit theory of its causal premises. As a univocal concept of determinism, it obscures essential differences between DCR ontological realism that embraces emergent powers materialism and empirical reductionism that does not. To this end, Bhaskar makes a distinction between ubiquity determinism and regulative determinism

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34  Philosophical materialism (2008a, 70).14 Regulative determinism holds to a causal relation of Humean “constant conjunctions” whereby “for every event y there is an event x or set of events x1…xn such that x or x1…xn and y are regularly conjoined under some set of descriptions,” that is to say, “ ‘whenever this, then that’ ” (ibid., 69). Bhaskar argues, “regularity determinism is a mistake, which has been disastrous for our understanding of science” (ibid.). By conflating events and laws, from which derives the “doctrine of the actuality of causal laws” or the mistake of Humean “actualism” (and its corollary, empirical realism), the march toward reductionism and an atomistic ontology is so ordered (ibid., 64). Within closed scientific/​experimental conditions, constant conjunctions can be rendered clear and distinct. These artificial conditions, however, do not provide a model for how the world works. The regularity of conjunctions granted by closed conditions cannot be transposed into open conditions with the same “what and why” logic. Regulative determinism collapses (reductively) the actual into the real, giving the false “regulative” sensibility. In other words, in the “regulative view,” what has happened actually has happened because of inextricable linkages between cause and effect of the type found in closed conditions. However, the world is not a closed system, the ontology of reality is not reducible to a sum total of atomistic constant conjunctions in sequence, and scientific laws must be transfactually real (hence retrodicted) rather than “empirically real” as their sole instantiation. DCR provides an explicit theory of how closed systems differ from open systems, and accounts for the fact scientific laws must necessarily operate in both, despite the fact that it is only in closed systems that constant conjunctions obtain. Constant conjunctions in closed conditions indeed provide a window to the “secrets of the universe.” However, the production of conjunctions is only facilitated by an artificial methodology to provide closure. Without closure, and in an open world of apparent “constant disjunctions” (where many things happen but other things do not), the creation, constitution, and direction or “eventing” of things are not grounded in constant conjunctions but rather by the interactions of emergent causal powers, and are characterized by multiplicity, plurality, conjunctions, absence, and transformation. Science seeks to understand the underlying (real) generative mechanisms and causal structures that account for all constituents of the universe. Consequently, the empirical realist position disintegrates because “a sequence of events [a constant conjunction] can only function as a criterion for a law if the latter is ontologically irreducible to the former” (and hence transfactual) (ibid., 65). Because “unless causal laws persisted and operated outside the context of their closure, i.e. where no constant conjunctions of events obtained, science could not be used in the explanation, prediction, construction, and diagnosis of the phenomena of ordinary life” (ibid., 65). Regulative determinism ultimately results in a “mechanical determinism” because it can only presume that at rock bottom, all events in the manifest world (the actual) can be reduced to atomistic conjunctions, which thus constitute the world in a fully determined sequence. In contrast, Bhaskar’s

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Philosophical materialism 35 transcendental realism draws on a broader position of ubiquity determinism, which “asserts that every event has a real cause” (ibid., 70). At face value, the difference between these two forms of determination may appear obscure; however, by this difference DCR emergent realism provides a more accurate (and perhaps parsimonious) theory of reality contra the reductionist presupposition of Humean empirical realism. The distinction is predicated on different “concepts” of causality (ibid.). “For the ubiquity determinist the cause is that thing, material or agent which is productive of an effect;…for the regularity determinist it is the total set of conditions that regularly precedes or accompanies an event” (ibid., italics mine). As discussed above, the transcendental argument, in virtue of the causal criterion of reality, is that things, materials, or agents are defined by their emergent causal powers. Conversely, the empirical realist argument (in avoidance of supposedly unwarranted “metaphysical commitments” to causal powers that are intrinsic to, or emergent from, things, materials, or agents) is willing only to posit a set of antecedent conditions (whenever this—​) in precedence to an effect (—​then that) as a regular event-​conjunction. Empiricism is characterized by its epistemic fallacy, delimiting being in terms of human-​centered-​scopic knowledge, viz., equating being with experience. On the contrary, for realists, objective reality is formed by the totality of tendencies inherent to things, materials, and agents as their sui generis powers. In addition: The transcendental realist sees the various sciences as attempting to understand things and structures in themselves, at their own level of being, without making reference to the diverse conditions under which they exist and act, and as making causal claims which are specific to the events and individuals concerned. (Bhaskar 2008a, 78) This is the search for transfactual generative mechanisms and causal structures, whose causal tendencies may or may not manifest in the actual, and to “call them out” as real, emergent powers, operating “underneath” or “behind” the manifest world. However, even with the apparent asymptotic approach to absolute knowledge, it remains the case reality will always “transcend” or exceed human knowledge about reality. Science and knowledge production accords with the precept of fallibilism consequently, because new facts “on the ground” could always arise. In addition, transcendental realism, in Bhaskar’s view, “aim[s]‌to present a systematic account of science” (ibid., 261). It is the attempt to outline in explicit terms what “has been implicit in the thinking [activity] of most creative scientists from Galileo to our own time” (ibid., 255, quoting Körner, 1975, 397). It has sought to critique the “already existing philosophical theories” of science, to make philosophy of science finally “consistent with”—​and to “make… explicit what is already presupposed by”—​the actually existing activity of science (ibid., 260, 257).

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36  Philosophical materialism The larger problem transcendental realism aims to avoid is the consequence by which regulative determinism “conflat[es] the actual with the necessary and the possible,” with the consequence of suggesting everything that happens (the actual) is predetermined to happen (necessarily) as such (as the only possibility) (Hartwig 2007b, 122). Using the model of “human-​made” closed-​ system constant conjunctions as an ontological principle hypostatizes the anatomist cause-​effect conjunction as the basis of reality. On the contrary, the world is an open system; all things are caused ontologically; science is the pursuit of knowledge of the intransitive transfactual laws that govern manifest (actual) reality. Experimental closure, producing “if this, then that” forms of conjunctions, provides working understandings of causal structures and generative mechanisms. However, in open systems, the experimental condition that “the same cause always has the same effect and the same effect always has the same cause [has the consequence of]…eliminating both the possibility of a disjunctive plurality of causes and of a disjunctive plurality of effects” (Bhaskar 2008a, 73). Moreover, this principle bears on the larger thrust of this book pertaining to the “social world” confronted by social scientists, which is worth repeating. Despite the “hard-​science envy” of social science, there can be no experimental closure on human beings. Human being operates in open conditions, and, granted forthcoming arguments for reflexive agency, human beings are ontologically-​existentially undetermined—​in principle—​within the parameters of their bio-​psychological constitution. The goal of science (in its actuality) is thus to understand the nature of the open world through closed-​world explanations. However, in open systems, what is possible always exceeds or is “greater than” what turns out to be actual. For every event, various configurations of conditions could have altered the time, place, outcomes, etc. of its process. What is “possible” has supreme importance to human affairs, both individually for “reflexivity” and decision-​ making in the course of life and in relation to what “actually” manifests sociopolitically in the distribution of authority and power. Ubiquity determinism declares that the actual is in fact always caused, but the “necessary” antecedents do not have to be a fixed set such that if (a state) S1 produces S2 and S2 produces S3, S1 will always produce S3. Ubiquity determinism does not entail a regular and predetermined theory of causality because of interventions, contradictions, countervailing conditions, etc. of the sort found in open systems. On the contrary: It is not the case that, because S1 produced S2 and S2 produced S3, S1 produced S3—​if, for example, S2 possessed emergent powers…or the system is which S3 if formed is open or is some of the processes at work are stochastic [viz., randomly determined]. (Hartwig 2007b, 122) The DCR claim, consequently, is that causality is not a linear sequence of causal events that is always reducible, in principle, to fixed constant

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Philosophical materialism 37 conjunctions. “At best, regularities can be symptoms of the presence of laws,” the latter which “stem from the causal powers either of particulars or of systems” (Psillos 2007, 61). In an open system characterized by a stratified depth ontology, emergence, transfactual tendencies, countervailing powers, and boundary conditions, “causation is multiple and plural” within the parameters of ubiquity determinism (Hartwig 2007b, 122). For there is (1) overdetermination or “ ‘the multiple determination of events, structures, and totalities, and of the contradictions which constitute, reproduce, and transform them’,” focused on the interplay of “ ‘internal[ly]…generated as well as external and analytically separable causes’ ”; and (2) multilevel determination (or dual control) by which “higher agencies setting boundary conditions for the operation of lower-​level laws, and lower-​level strata providing the framework conditions of possibility of higher-​order ones; [and, of significance,] it makes self-​determination [human agency] possible” (ibid.). DCR philosophy of science thus seeks to rectify the empiricist predilection for eliminative reductionism, and to theorize the “actual fact” that science is concerned with discovering emergent generative mechanisms and causal structures as “real” actualities in the world. The fact that states of the world are ontologically determined ubiquitously does not grant science (or what Sartenaer terms a “perfectly competent cognitive being”) the capacity, in principle, to predict future states of the world (2015b, 63, note 2). Emergent novelties by definition cannot be forethought, the world does not give “prior” warnings, and there are no “predictive algorithms” or inductive logics employable to predict future states of a system with certainty. The central argument against reductionism and the possibility for prediction is that they are mutually entailing. If prediction is possible based on full knowledge of existing entities etc. and how they will behave in novel interactions, forming the nature of future system-​states or “XY wholes,” then reductionist explanations are possible because scientists (or human minds) could explain higher-​level entities, orders, structures, powers, etc., and future events solely in terms of lower-​level “parts,” causal bases, or preceding events. On the contrary, if prediction of novel entities, orders, events, properties from parts or events responsible for genuine novelty is impossible, then reductionist explanation is impossible. Both impossibilities are predicated on a misguided notion that independent properties of entities can be used to predict their future interactions. How the “parts” function would be the same for both future states and reductionist explanation. However, if novel relational properties are essential to the nature of the whole, then wholes cannot be explained fully in virtue of the properties of parts without recourse to the nature of the relationships between parts. And this is precisely the ontological reality the theory of emergence claims to identify as properties “greater than the sum of parts.” The powers, liabilities, properties, etc. of emergent novelties cannot be predicted, and a reductionist enterprise (like explaining the capacities of consciousness or the functions of different types of cells) cannot account for capacities and functions by a recourse to the micro structures from where they

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38  Philosophical materialism emerge. Emergence thus slices through the logics of prediction and reduction in one swoop.

The emergence of novelty in time and space As discussed above, for Sartenaer, the theory of emergence he defends is predicated on “qualitative novelty,” identified by what he calls a “failure of determinative traceability” (2015a, 3, italics Sartenaer’s). In other words, “it is not possible to provide a complete and adequate account of the successive relations of determination that lead—​or have led—​from the emergence basis to the emergent” (ibid.). More specifically, Sartenaer argues that novelty depends on the causal non-​traceability of diachronic emergence and constitutive non-​explainability of synchronic emergence “as a matter of principle—​i.e. unexplainability ‘once and for all’, independently of any present and future technical or cognitive limitations”—​as opposed to a limitation of “practice” (ibid., 7, italics Sartenaer’s). The claim here is a novel emergent cannot be predicted or forecasted before the fact of its emergence “in the intuitive sense that it exhibits properties that are not exhibited by its current underlying basis” (ibid., 5, italics Sartenaer’s). The claim of qualitative novelty is also “a commitment that secures the rejection of radical reductionism, or the idea that an emergent and its basis are merely identical” (ibid.). Upon examination of jars of oxygen and hydrogen, little would suggest the emergence of water from their intermixture (nor the danger of making water from scratch), and scarcely would Bill Gates’ precocious childhood in Seattle suggest the emergence of Microsoft. It is only after the fact of emergent properties and events so manifested that explanation of these facts (because they are identifiable) becomes a viable enterprise.15 The concept of emergence is qualified by two distinct forms of emergence, diachronic emergence and synchronic emergence. These two forms of emergence identify a different pattern of relationship between an emergence basis and the “qualitative novelty” of the emergent, one historic and one constitutive. Diachronic emergence as “historical novelty” arises from causes that precede it in time, and covers both the sense of events (wars, new fashions, technological developments, earthquakes, ice ages, etc.) and the sense of change (growth, evolution, transformation, entropy, decomposition, etc.) (ibid.). Synchronic emergence as “constitutive novelty” accounts for the world of entities, structures, and structurata across the natural and social world, whose “constitutive novelty” arises from lower-​level emergence bases, accounting for things like atoms, molecules, chairs, consciousness, and biological species (ibid.). The first form, diachronic emergence, captures the sense things in the world develop, arise, or come about in time—​natural catastrophes, species evolution, social events, personal growth, etc. Diachronic emergence is relatively uncontroversial and marks change, becoming, and unforeseen possibilities. It accounts for the transformation of existence in terms of “historic novelty”

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Philosophical materialism 39 in which the novel emergent is “causally determined by its emergence basis” (ibid., 4, italics Sartenaer’s). Historic novelty is instantiated “to the extent that it exhibits properties that were not exhibited in the past by its emergence basis” (ibid., 5). As such, the causal relation between bases and emergents involves temporal and possibly spatial displacement (however minimal) between the two, and thus is concerned with the etiological or historical pathway of the emergent. It also identifies two senses of historic novelty, “primary novelty” (the original emergence of something) and “secondary novelties” (derivations of the original novelty that subsequently emerge) (Sartenaer 2015b, 66). For example, mechanisms of biological evolution, natural selection, and sexual reproduction contributed to the primary general novelty of humankind and continue to contribute to the secondary genetic novelty of every human being.16 In addition, the concept of diachronic emergence is central to the dialectical transformation of basic critical realist ontological categories to account for change, becoming, and absence. The second form, synchronic emergence, is the crucial and controversial form. Synchronic emergence directly challenges reductionism and dualism, seeking a middle ground between the two. Synchronic emergence captures the sense, in simplest terms, that things (molecules, consciousness, social structures, etc.) operate in ways “greater than the sum of their parts.” Synchronic emergence—​emergence that is “together in time”—​refers to constitutive arrangements of parts to wholes, such that properties of a structure at one level determine macroproperties at a higher level. Synchronic emergence is thus a relationship whereby “the emergent is constitutively determined by its emergence basis” (2015a, 4, italics Sartenaer’s). Higher-​level wholes, forms, entities, properties, and so on emerge from lower-​ level structures governed by laws appropriate to the level (of physics, chemistry, etc.). For Sartenaer, the constitutive nature of synchronic emergence as a vertical relation between parts and wholes has two “declinations”: compositional and non-​ compositional (ibid.). Compositional synchronic emergence is relation of parts and wholes, effecting “inter-​level emergence” that builds up or composes scientifically established levels of reality—​from the subatomic, atomic, molecular, cellular, to the biological—​whereby the structural possibility of latter levels presupposes all preceding levels. Non-​compositional synchronic emergence is a relation between a “set of entities [that] fulfill the role that is defining of the other set of entities,” and, rather than being a relationship between different levels, it identifies different orders of a singular level, which Sartenaer terms intra-​level or inter-​order emergence (ibid.). Emergent properties such as solidity, liquidity, and transparency are features derived from particular atomic, molecular, and cellular structures, which constitute the emergent feature. In these forms, the emergent features are intimately related to the same level as their emergence basis, effecting inter-​order emergence. For example, an ounce of 24-​carat gold is an amalgam of Au atoms. Gold’s properties of density, malleability, and ductility are inter-​order emergent properties directly

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40  Philosophical materialism tied to a lower-​order base of atoms (and why an ounce can be flattened to 300 square feet of semi-​transparent leaf). Au at the atomic level is presupposed by its composition out of an inter-​level base of subatomic particles. In comparison, organic material is composed of cells, whether a tree, human heart, or paramecium whose manifest properties and structure derive from an inter-​ order emergent base of different types of cells. Cells are emergent from an inter-​level base structure of cell parts, themselves composed of lower-​level compositional emergents:  amino acids and proteins, constructed out of molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. When structured, cells form biological entities with manifest capacities and functions, the most impressive of which perhaps is the human brain. The crucial instance of “inter-​order” synchronic emergence for the purposes of this book (and the sole example Sartenaer gives for elucidation) is the relation between “the neurobiological order and the psychological order” (ibid.).17

The inextricable logic of diachronic and synchronic emergence Sartenaer’s key argument for the “inextricability” of the two forms of emergence gives theoretical purchase on the relationship between spatial and temporal aspects of all existence (2015a, 18).18 While it is important to maintain the distinction between diachronic and synchronic forms of emergence, when brought together, the two forms capture an essential truth of the world: everything emerged at some point in time, diachronically (perhaps even the universe and fundamental laws governing its nature), and everything is composed of smaller parts, synchronically (with the caveat that some non-​ decomposable zero point or “Higgs particle” may ultimately ground reality). Consequently, in ontological terms, everything in the past, everything in the present, and everything in the future is both diachronically and synchronically emergent. Sartenaer describes it this way: “emergence is essentially a ‘two-​ faceted’ notion, i.e., it always encapsulates both synchronic and diachronic dimensions…[such that] synchronic emergence entails diachronic emergence and vice versa” (ibid., 1–​2, italics Sartenaer’s). Any instance of synchronic novelty is simultaneously a new historical instantiation, and any instance of diachronic novelty is simultaneously a new constitutive instantiation. Every entity thus holds intimate relationships with “lower-​order and lower-​ level entities as well as past entities” (ibid., 5). While it is a commonplace understanding of diachronic emergence that all things come into existence—​ human consciousness emerged with the evolutionary manifestation of homo sapiens—​simultaneously, consciousness also synchronically emerged in virtue of the brain’s microstructure of neurons and the complex macrostructure. As such, investigation and analysis of an entity “E” thus involves both a constitutive explanation “describ[ing] the processes and interactions that make up E” and “an etiological explanation of E…tracing the causal processes and interactions that lead to E” (ibid., 6, italics, Sartenaer’s). The inextricability of emergence thus renders it primarily perspectival, an epistemic/​analytical

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Philosophical materialism 41 difference entailing different methodologies to uncover each dimension. This allows scientists to separate and examine the causal structures and constitutional generative mechanisms operating at both the synchronic and diachronic moments of emergence. The larger philosophical point is that “novelty” as an emergent possibility remains undetermined and hence unpredictable until the moment synchronic (ahistorical) and diachronic (historical) antecedents consolidate their constitutive and causal powers in dialectical relation with the specific conditions (or context). These antecedents and conditions all form the ubiquitous determination of the emergent, and consequently why all “being” in the world is actually a “becoming.” The inextricability of emergence as an ontological feature of the world consequently resolves how concrete manifestations of the “actual” are embedded in space-​time such that (and however flip) every-​thing happens.19

Emergence and causality? The central controversy over synchronic emergence is whether or not, in addition to the higher-​level and novel “wholes” so constituted and caused, irreducible causal powers also emerge in virtue of categorical properties and structural features of the emergent whole. Sartenaer’s view of synchronic emergence is agnostic toward the “strong” theory of emergence proclaiming “new irreducible causal powers” arising from an emergence basis (2015a, 3). Sartenaer’s weaker version of emergence as “failure of determinative traceability,” nonetheless, does not preclude the possibility of synchronic emergents having irreducible causal powers. DCR accepts the arguments Sartenaer makes for “qualitative novelty” and for “failure of determinative traceability,” as they are an obvious and important first step to grounding the stronger version. DCR necessarily defends the strong version of emergent (non-​reductive) causal powers, and thus accords the causal criterion of reality its full potential across all strata of reality. As the emergence of “qualitative novelty” is predicated on the “non-​ identity” of an emergent and its emergence basis, it is not implausible the “causal powers” of an emergent are also novel to and non-​identical with the emergence basis. For one, Sartenaer’s key claim that synchronic and diachronic forms of emergence are “inextricable” or “coextensional” suggests any instance of diachronic emergence requires emergent entities and their properties constituted by upward, synchronic relations of parts and wholes.20 Second, as historic novelty arises out of a causal relation between an emergence basis and its emergent, and “there isn’t necessarily any difference in level or order between putative diachronic emergents and their bases,” it follows that diachronic causality presumes synchronically “constituted” and irreducible powers that can interact causally in the world at the same level, powers neither “exhibited by its current underlying basis” (synchronically) nor “exhibited in the past by its emergent basis” (diachronically) (ibid., 5,

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42  Philosophical materialism italics Sartenaer’s). Before people can “make history” they have to have the emergent capacities of consciousness to do something novel, and the cause and effect of human historic novelty will be at the same order and level of human existence expressed in concept and practice—​vats of neurons cannot set records, start wars, change laws. Both in thought and practice, human agents require social antecedents for intentional activity of “saying, doing, and making,” which in turn either reproduces or transforms the antecedent social forms (Bhaskar 1998, 34)  Social reproduction (or transformation) consequently is a process of diachronic emergence, as it requires causality by agents to affect the process, even when habitually or subconsciously impelled. Human agency, however, presumes capacities derived from consciousness, which remains the chief bugaboo that theories of emergence and causality must vindicate. Once dualism and idealism are justly banished from consideration, consciousness seems to violate materialist principles of cause and effect, reality and irreality. Consciousness is a qualitative experience, ethereal and unavailable to objective, empirical investigation, and neuroscientific attempts to explain consciousness remain inadequate and unsatisfying. Sartenaer’s account of emergence does not provide a substantive theory of consciousness, but it does provide an alternative philosophy of mind to challenge the reductive model, whose hegemony remains part and parcel of the scientific worldview on the brain. The question of reduction turns on the distinction between causal emergence and causal reduction, and it is essential to defend a theory of emergence granting ontological and hence causal efficacy to emergents. Emergence justifies the independent and sui generis causal powers, capacities, dispositions, and liabilities operating at all levels of a stratified reality. If causal powers can emerge simultaneously with higher-​level “wholes,” there are three general possibilities for their expression in the world:  causal efficacy vis-​à-​vis other emergents at the same level; a capacity for “downward causation,” viz., recursive powers of the emergent to affect the constituents of its lower-​level basis by setting boundary conditions on lower-​level operations; and the possibility to “add their weight” as constituents in higher-​level wholes. Moreover, the theory of emergence underlies most if not all facets of the DCR philosophical ontology presented in this chapter: (1) ontological realism concerning intransitive natural and social objects of knowledge in the world, characterized by their natural necessity; (2) a depth ontology of stratified reality, viz., a “laminate” of lower and higher levels of reality, with each higher level presupposing its lower one(s), including key “units of analysis” discussed in the course of this book: human consciousness, agency, subjectivity, and social forms; and (3) the generative mechanisms responsible for states of absence and processes of negation, which account for change, decomposition, and becoming.

The emergence of causality An argument for emergent forms of causality requires a fine-​grained analysis, and the challenge is laid bare in the contentious philosophical debates

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Philosophical materialism 43 surrounding the nature of and relationship between dispositional properties and categorical properties.21 In this section I draw on the work of Max Kistler (2007) to defend a key DCR premise for sui generis and non-​reductive forms of causal power. Kistler defends a realist version of causality by undermining the philosophical reductionist view of dispositional and categorical properties, which first reifies each property and then accounts for dispositions solely in terms of categorical properties. In their reified definitions, which Kistler argues against, dispositional properties are the capacities and causal powers associated with entities in their interactions in the world. Categorical properties are the defining features of an entity in terms of its categorical base of structure, composition, and shape. Water, for example, has categorical properties of transparency and liquidity entailed from its categorical base being the molecular structure of H2O. Water has dispositional properties including solubility and mechanical and chemical erosion. Using the same terms, consciousness has categorical properties of electrical and chemical signal transmission and a macro-​brain structure built out of networks of neurons. Consciousness has dispositional properties of awareness, reflexive awareness, and the capacity to do, say, and make. The logic of reification and reduction assumes (1)  categorical properties are distinct from dispositional properties: there are things and there are dispositions of things to do; (2) dispositional properties are derived from a causal base, from which dispositions arise as effects; (3)  the causal base is equivalent to the microstructural reduction base such that dispositions inherit their powers from, or are an effect of, the microstructures of categorical properties. The intuition of the reductionist view is derived from the materialist scientific worldview and its revolutionary success of decompositional analysis of the world into microstructural reduction bases. Various levels of reality (atomic, molecular, cellular, biological, etc.) are composites of lower-​level structural relations: biology from cells, molecules from atoms, and down the line. Any given level of reality can thus be analyzed in terms of its reduction base. In other words, macroscopic properties and structures at one level are relative to microscopic properties and structures at lower ones. However, the sticking point concerns how the compositional arrangements of higher and lower levels bear on the formation of macroscopic dispositional powers (relative to whichever level is under consideration). The reductionist view holds that the possibility for compositional reduction of the world also holds true for dispositional powers constituting the world. Realists argue otherwise: the causal base is not ontologically equivalent to, or interchangeable with, the reduction base. Macroscopic categorical properties can be a causal base responsible for dispositional powers. The question standing before DCR and Kistler’s causal powers realism is how dispositions emerge as sui generis in virtue of their categorical base. If the theoretical identification and analysis of manifest (macroscopic) capacities or powers in the world is superfluous because all powers can be explained away by lower (microscopic) levels, then ontological realism concerning causal

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44  Philosophical materialism powers of “things with parts”—​including consciousness, human agency, and social forms—​becomes ungrounded. Consequently, the central challenge to realist philosophy (for the programs of both DCR and Kistler) is to negate two widespread assumptions. The first is to reject the philosophical legacy that isolates dispositional properties as separate macroscopic effects from the underlying categorical realm of properties. Once reified as a distinct property, dispositions are left “hanging,” and beg for a reductive explanation because by the terms of the legacy, categorical properties cannot function as a causal base for dispositions. Without a theory of synchronic emergence to account for macroscopic entities and their categorical properties, the divide between a microscopic reduction-​causal base and a disposition flattens reality as a microstructural affair. On the contrary, Kistler argues the categorical/​dispositional distinction is not ontological but epistemic: they do not denote different properties, but denote different points of view on the same causal property under question, and “[do] not introduce any difference between efficacious and non efficacious properties” (2007, 122). Consequently, categorical properties can function as a causal base. For philosophical realists, the manifest (macroscopic) sum world is generated from a multiplicity of causal processes and their interaction, originating from the categorical properties of entities/​structures/​structurata (with scientific laws governing their emergence, or in DCR terms, the transfactuality and “natural necessity” of dispositional powers). The search for generative mechanisms and causal structures responsible for the manifest world is central to the scientific enterprise. The identification of a manifest disposition thus acts as a “symptom” of a causal base in operation. Nonetheless, the identification and analysis of a disposition is neither derivative nor “soft.” The disposition “to do something” as a power, propensity, tendency, or inclination includes in its definition or (re)description of sui generis causal powers all necessary features—​contextual, structural, and/​or conditions of possibility—​ that must be present or in force to allow the causal power to manifest itself in phenomenal, macroscopic levels of reality (again, relative to each level). The full extent and nature of these necessary features may be unknown, unseen, and untheorized. However, in this way, dispositions can be “unpacked” and analyzed in terms of their unique powers and the enablements and constraints that condition their manifestation. The manifestation of dispositions in the world corresponds to the DCR recognition of the “actual” as the concrete expression of underlying generative mechanisms and causal structures. Dispositions so actualized are known empirically or “described in observational terms” (ibid., 122, italics Kistler’s) while a categorical base corresponds to the DCR concept of the “real,” whose “identity [in terms of] scientifically conceived properties is determined by laws that do not necessarily bear on observable properties” and thus can be represented in theory or mathematical equation (as abstractions) (ibid.). While the categorical/​dispositional distinction is epistemic (transitive categories of

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Philosophical materialism 45 knowledge), they share a common intransitive reference to a causal base. Kistler defines the “ ‘causal base’ (or ‘categorical base’) of a disposition possessed by an object…[as] the set of intrinsic (i.e., non-​relational) properties of the object that contribute causally to bringing about the manifestations of the disposition” (ibid., 117). Scientific knowledge of categorical bases, on the one hand, is developed only through the identification of their “strict” counterfactual conditionals, realized finally, a posteriori, in the closed and “frictionless” space of scientific inquiry.22 Dispositional properties, on the other, are subject to counterfactual conditionals that include a “ceteris paribus caveat” to account for the contingent expression of underlying capacities and powers operating in open systems (of enablements and countervailing powers or “antidotes”). Knowledge of a causal base in operation via their manifest dispositions is thus realized initially, a priori, by phenomenological definition and analogical reasoning as the “first step” before identifying the underlying mechanisms and causal powers that have contributed to any manifestation of a disposition. Using Kistler’s example, the term “fragility,” for instance, designates a disposition to break easily—​whether glass, clay, or egos—​and the ascription of fragility to a thing is a judgment by definition. The categorical/​causal base for fragility is more obscure, and requires a scientific approach for explanation. Furthermore, “once a complete scientific description of the situation has been given,” dispositions or powers of things can be retranslated into causal laws, which “necessitate their effects,” but do not “necessitate their manifestations,” because they can be countervailed by other powers, often unseen in open systems (ibid., 119). The distinction between strict and contingent counterfactual conditional instantiations of “real” and “actualized” powers shows that categorical and dispositional “recognitions” of powers are overlapping, with the former presupposing the latter, but not necessitating the latter. The second assumption Kistler rejects is “the only causally efficacious properties [operating in the world] are…microphysical base properties” (ibid., 110). As a consequence of this assumption, microphysical reduction bases are conflated with causal bases, and consequently, reified macroscopic dispositional powers are evinced as effects of microscopic base properties. As is the case with the first assumption above, philosophical mischief arises from imposing the dispositional/​categorical distinction as an ontological distinction, as different properties in the world. The distinction satisfies the atomistic intuition that there are “things” and there are “powers,” each of which seem to have distinct properties at the phenomenal range of human experience. The confusion impels the reductionist error to devolve causal responsibility for manifest dispositions to the microscopic, without entertaining the possibility that categorical properties at the same macroscopic level can contribute causally to manifestations of the dispositions.23 Kistler’s argument accepts an uncontroversial claim that microproperties “lawfully” or “nomologically” determine macroproperties (ibid., 139). This falls in line with scientific knowledge of multiple levels of reality, out of

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46  Philosophical materialism which higher-​order, more complex levels are grounded in lower levels. The constituents that constitute an entity/​structure/​structuratum form a reduction base, whether neurons composing a brain, atoms composing a molecule, or soldiers composing the Russian Army. The correct insight of the reductionist enterprise is that an entity can be decomposed into a set of “parts,” with the possibility ever present for additional decompositions into deeper or lower-​ level reduction bases. The problem with the axiom of reductionism is the ontological status of a categorical base per se becomes confused with the ontological status of a reduction base. Once the dispositional/​categorical are distinguished and reified as different properties, dispositions are considered mere “effects” of a category base—​falsely equated to a reduction base. The hubristic overkill is the supposition that any causal power(s) associated with a structure (as a disposition) must necessarily also be located to its reduction base. The reductionist enterprise does not give empirically validated “actualities,” viz., “dispositional powers” a chance, relegating them as epiphenomenal of or identical to reduction bases. On the contrary, Kistler argues macroscopic causal powers can emerge from structures because of the interaction of constituents on the same level, which a reductionist paradigm cannot account for and hence, the reductionist paradigm cannot abide the synchronic emergence of a causal base, responsible for dispositions emanating from the base. Because “the categorical base is not necessarily the reduction base,” dispositional capacities associated with categorical bases are not axiomatically reducible to properties of microstructures (ibid., 118).24 In addition, Kistler argues if “categorical macroproperties are not identical to any microproperty,” and hence not reducible, it follows that “manifestations of a disposition of object O must be caused by properties of O, not by properties of O’s parts” (ibid., 136). While an object O has a micro-​reduction base of parts (whether a molecule, conscious state, etc.), “the existence of a real whole and its various causal powers” emerges from “the various nomological interactions between the parts” (ibid., 137). Macroscopic properties thus formed out of the interactions are not reducible, because any interference in the nomological laws regulating the parts of a real whole will disrupt the function of the macrostructure in terms of its nature and causal dispositions. Moreover, just because microstructures constitute macrostructures, the “principle of causal explanatory exclusion” (that two independent causes cannot have the same singular effect, entailing overdetermination) does not undermine the argument for the emergence and reality of causally efficacious macroproperties. It is not the case that both a microstructure reduction base and a macrostructure causal base are independently responsible for macroscopic causal dispositions. Both levels are “instantiated at the same time and place but…are not independent because one set of properties [the micro] nomologically determines the other [the macro]” (ibid., 137, italics Kistler’s). The confusion, in Kistler’s view, stems from the unwarranted

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Philosophical materialism 47 conflation of the reduction and causal bases, when “both are sufficient for the same effect”: both are ontologically real and valid targets for scientific examination, and both existentially contribute to the formation of dispositional powers (ibid.). Higher macroscopic levels encapsulate lower levels, with the former taking up qualities and constitutive powers of the latter, but this is in virtue of novel relations brought into being as a novel causal base, from which dispositional powers emerge. Furthermore, higher-​level structures and their dispositions have the power to set boundary conditions on the lower by virtue of structural determination and novel internal and external relationships only the higher level can form. For instance, Kistler argues it is “coherent and conceptually possible to conceive of…a macroscopic theoretical property…belonging to a person rather than to its microscopical parts, its neurons” (ibid., 135). For the disposition to “hear,” the causal base is constituted by the lawful (biophysical) connections between the frontal cortex and primary auditory cortex. The microscopic reduction base of both cortices is composed of different types of neurons. However, only by virtue of the relationship between both cortices and eardrums is hearing actualized. The structural relationship between the three is the causal base for the disposition “to hear,” which causally contributes to actual manifestations of “hearing a sound”:  the crying baby, gunshots, the wind in the trees. The disposition to hear, of course, requires more than the sound of silence. Consequently, there are two sets of questions: one pertains to the macroscopic brain structure giving rise to the capacity to hear; the other, “a second and independent step,” focuses on the mechanics and biophysics of hearing in terms of the “microscopical, i.e., neurophysiological, basis of [the] macroscopic psychological property” (ibid., 135). Kistler’s “dispositionalism,” contra the two assumptions of the reductionist enterprise, rests on the thesis that “it is coherent, and at least sometimes plausible, to conceive of dispositional macroproperties as causally efficacious and nevertheless distinct from the microscopic properties in their reductive base” (ibid., 111). Kistler’s argument for the causally efficacious macroproperties is grounded in a realist defense of the causal criterion of reality. Though Kistler is not an avowed critical realist, his definition is in accord with DCR: For an entity to be real it is necessary and sufficient that it is capable to make a difference to causal interactions. The crucial idea is that the capacity to interact causally—​or to contribute to determining causal interactions—​is not only the ultimate justification for the existence of an entity, but it also provides a criterion for determining the nature of that entity, i.e. its properties. (2002, 57, italics Kistler’s) If dispositional causal powers emerge as a function or effect of categorical bases, defined as discrete and sui generis, the causal criterion of reality justifies the non-​reductive reality of entities found at different levels of reality.

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48  Philosophical materialism As such, Kistler’s argument is essential to support a notion of synchronic emergence of causal powers that breaks the explanatory “monopoly of microproperties in matters of causal efficacy” (2007, 111). Microscopic parts (as an emergence basis) nomologically constitute a macroscopic structure (categorical base/​causal basis). At the same time, the parts “indirectly” enable the emergence macroscopic causal power because they are necessary to build entities with macroscopic powers. The microscopic parts, however, do not “cause” the macroscopic causal power—​they have no monopoly. To give another example, in the disposition to transmit heredity, Kistler concurs that DNA molecules are the micro-​reductive component responsible for phenotypic expression in offspring. However, this “does not mean that the only properties that are causally efficacious in the transmission of the hereditary characteristic of [a person] are the properties of her microscopic parts” (ibid., 137). DNA molecules “are not directly causally responsible for the manifestation of the disposition” because “the effect is only brought about by the mediation of a complex set of interactions between the DNA molecules and a large number of other parts of the organism” (ibid.). Transmission of heredity is a disposition in which DNA plays a “starring role” but not the exclusive causal role in the actual manifestation of a baby with a unique phenotype. The “category base” of genetic transmission is a larger system of constituents (including DNA, but also the structure of the gamete) which mutually constitute the generated capacity for heritability. The reductionist methodology employed in the scientific pursuit of generative mechanisms and microstructures of genetic transmission has revealed the double helix, DNA molecules, and the latter’s atomic composition. The disposition to heredity is thus largely unpacked in terms of its microphysical basis. Nonetheless, the microstructural reduction of the relevant constituents in heritability is an “independent enterprise” from the discovery of the causal powers that emerge from categorical bases, and as such “does not justify the identification of the reduced property with the reducing property” (ibid., 138). While microproperties are responsible for (or “lawfully determine”) macroproperties, “the micro-​and macroproperties do not compete for being the property that is causally responsible for the manifestation of the disposition” (ibid., 138–​39). In simplest terms, parts form larger “wholes,” whether construed as structures/​systems/​entities/​structurata. From “wholes” emerge sui generis powers that require all the constituents working together to form causal properties. If a part fails or is absent, the causal property is compromised (e.g., damage to the auditory cortex, or infertility because of blocked fallopian tubes). This suggests that only wholes can make a causal contribution to actual manifestations, whether erosion by drops of rain, the hearing of a scream by cortices, or birth of a blue-​eyed baby by a reproductive system. In sum, Kistler’s argument supports the capacity for human agency such that “our desires and beliefs and other psychological properties give us

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Philosophical materialism 49 dispositions to think and act, and contribute thus causally to the actions by which these dispositions manifest themselves” (ibid., 135). “Categorical psychological properties,” (ibid.) such as a “desire for food,” beget a disposition to fulfill the desire. Dispositions may or may not be actualized because of constraints or countervailing powers (such as no money, no time, or a diet regime). However, if the desire is acted upon—​the disposition to eat made manifest in an action (making a sandwich, hitting the drive-​through at Whataburger)—​ Kistler argues the “desire” as a categorical basis has made an irreducible causal contribution to the act of eating. Moreover, as the identification of a disposition includes the conditions of its manifestation, for complex psychological properties such as a belief or desire, there are immediate psychoanalytical and anthropological implications. Personal psychodynamics and the sociocultural milieu in which subject-​agents are enculturated are intrinsic features to the formation of subjectivity, precisely constituted by sets of beliefs and desires each person holds. The nominally simple “desire for food,” once transposed into action, necessarily draws in conditions including taboos, social identity, and social position, and inflection by economic, governmental, and symbolic systems. People might claim sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a cheeseburger is just a cheeseburger; however, they are inherently invested with significance and social implications. Beliefs and desires are symptomatic of choices subjects make, the projects they undertake, and the systems of power they inhabit, issues I consider in chapter five.

Generative mechanisms DCR is explicit in its ontological commitments, and central to the transcendental realist argument are the theories of generative mechanisms and causal structures. As discussed above, manifestations of the “actual” or “concrete” are preconditioned by or “constellationally embedded” in processes of the real/​abstract. Moreover, the relationships between the real-​actual/​abstract-​ concrete show that natural necessities and necessary abstractions exert their powers in the “real world” when enabled by circumstances external to these powers as “contingent conditionals.” Diachronic and synchronic emergence of entities and causal powers gives rise to the stratification of reality and a multitude of forms of causality that tend toward increased complexity and specialization at higher levels. The relation between an emergence basis and emergent on the one hand, and the relation between a category base and macroscopic dispositions on the other, develop the DCR thesis that entities, structures, and structurata composed of “parts” or “constituents” have properties, powers, capacities, and liabilities that arise from the interaction of the parts. These novel emergent structures and their powers can be redescribed and accounted for in terms of mechanisms, uncovered by scientists or as yet undiscovered. Consequently, realist science is precisely the explication of the generative mechanisms and causal structures responsible for the “actual” or

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50  Philosophical materialism “concrete” world as a temporal process and an analysis of the conditions that enable or constrain their manifestation.25 Bunge (2004) provides an expanded view of mechanisms that builds on Sartenaer’s theory of emergence and Kistler’s theory of causal efficacy. Bunge’s theory of mechanisms is derived from an ontological position he terms systemism, in which “everything in the universe is, was, or will be a system or a component of one”; nothing exists as “permanent strays or isolates” (ibid., 190). These material systems are the condition of possibility for all processes in the universe and constitutively responsible for all its material. All material—​in its temporal existence—​emerges, transforms, entropies, and recombines, from the big bang (as theorized, the ultimate mechanism) to the present, and before and beyond. Material is also conveyed by various “happenings” that can be “grouped into natural kinds, such as those of fusion and fission, aggregation and dispersion, cooperation and competition, stimulation and inhibition, blocking and facilitating, and so on” that operate in concrete systems (ibid., 195). Bunge’s materialist ontology foregrounds two fundamental manifestations (both supported by natural necessity and emergence), one of systems and the other of mechanisms. Systems are ubiquitous in both the natural and social world, and point to any “complex object whose parts or components are held together by bonds of some kind” (ibid., 188). For conceptual systems, the bonds are “logical,” holding e.g. a “theory” or a religious tract together. For concrete systems, the bonds are “material,” holding together an “atom, cell, immune system, family, or hospital” (ibid.). Concrete systems thus emerge at all strata of reality and generate mechanisms that account for the features, properties, and activities of lower and higher levels. The existence of higher-​level mechanisms depends on generative mechanisms operating at the lower levels. Bunge’s model of a “system” has four aspects:  its composition (the “set of parts of the system”), environment (“items in the environment [or context] that act on [the system] or are acted upon by [the system]”), structure (“the set of bonds or ties that hold the components of [the system] together”), and mechanism (“the characteristic processes of [the system]”) (ibid.). In addition, Bunge makes a controversial claim that the presence and absence of mechanisms distinguishes “concrete systems” from “conceptual and semiotic systems” (ibid., 191). The latter have “compositions, environments, and structures but no mechanisms” (ibid.). Conceptual and semiotic systems are not mechanistic because “changeability (or energy) is the defining property of matter—​whether physical, chemical, living, social, or technical” (ibid., 191–​ 92). The structures of conceptual and semiotic systems are logically related and constituted in the act of representation. As such, these systems are only created, activated, and transmitted through intentional agency. Their signification requires the mechanism of human cognition garnered from the inherent capacities of consciousness to bring concepts and semiotic systems into effect—​to be thought, signified, and understood. For Bunge,

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Philosophical materialism 51 the difference between semiotic systems and concrete material systems is the latter are constituted by different fields of “energy”—​whether kinetic, chemical, electrical, or, central to social systems, agential energy. Wight (2004, 283–​99) argues Bunge is mistaken in his view that semiotic and conceptual systems are not mechanistic. To Wight (who is a critical realist), semiotic and conceptual systems can have mechanistic properties because they have intrinsic and irreducible “powers and liabilities,” which are emergent in virtue of the natural necessity of their powers, and thus justified by the causal criterion of reality (ibid., 284). In addition, Wight argues these systems are mechanisms that “make the social what it is” (ibid.). DCR stresses the “activity and concept dependency” of social systems on subject-​ agents, such that conceptual and semiotic systems are always imbricated in some fashion with social systems. Subject-​agents must have some “idea” of what they are doing when engaging in political, familial, economic, etc. activities. Moreover, intersubjectivity presupposes the ability to communicate, precisely through systems of language, semiotics, signals, and concepts. Bunge’s emphasis on concrete, material systems in his ontology of mechanisms, in Wight’s view, has misled Bunge to not recognize that conceptual and semiotic systems are “emergent.” The negative implication of this error entails they can only be explained by a reduction to underlying, “lower-​level” mechanisms—​ to the “real” causal powers in operation. I  agree with Wight’s critique of Bunge: while the “powers” of semiotic systems may remain unactualized until an agent “empowers” them, the meanings expressed in intersubjective (and intrasubjective) semiotic transactions are sui generis to the words, concepts, and signs employed. In other words, symbols are intransitive and have an objective existence:  they can be learned, remembered, and forgotten; they can be voiced, written down, and analyzed; their logical relations can become causal relations (especially when conceptual and deontological) through the force of their meaning. The minister says, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” The “characteristic process” of semiotic systems is the power—​as a mechanism—​of signification. Bunge is correct that conceptual and semiotic systems require “energy” for their activation, but it is also clear these systems have a form of causal power in virtue of their ability to convey meaning in acts of symbolic interlocution. Putting this small confusion in Bunge’s theory aside, mechanisms, in his terms (2004, 191), are the “characteristic” or innate “processes in concrete material systems, whether physical, social, technical, or of some other kind.” In concert with synchronic emergence, these processes emanate in virtue of the structured relationships among the constituents. Mechanisms account for all instances of causality and the laws that govern their operations, in effect that “no law, no possible mechanism; and no mechanism, no explanation” (ibid., 207). In addition, concrete systems can be countenanced in two distinct ways. They can be identified in terms of their innate mechanisms that are necessary effects of their composition. They also can be identified in terms of the mechanisms that were necessary antecedents of the system itself in both

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52  Philosophical materialism historic and constitutive terms of analysis. Photosynthesis is a mechanism of solar energy capture, but it is also emergent from anterior mechanisms such as the evolution of a primordial plant (or green slime), and evolution as a biological process is emergent from its own anterior mechanisms that are presently unknown. In Bunge’s view, scientific research is centered on the discovery of mechanisms responsible for the effects of processes, which are “typically…unobservable” (ibid., 200). The hypotheses of “continental drift” and “allergy” went unexplained until generative mechanisms were discovered decades later in the form of “plate tectonics” and “allergen/​antibody reactions” (ibid., 186). Likewise, mechanisms in the social world can be controversial or unknown:  political discord over social issues such as income inequality, climate change, geopolitical flare-​ups, and gender and race wage differentials is largely a struggle over the correct generative mechanism(s) responsible for the emergent property. In terms of “inputs” and “outputs” at the empirical or macroscopic level, Bunge describes the scientific endeavor as seeking the mechanism responsible for transforming the inputs into an output (ibid., 201). For instance, at the molecular level, atoms (input) synthesize into molecules (output), and science has identified “electron transfer and electron sharing” as primary mechanisms in operation (ibid., 183). Science thus seeks the identification of a mechanism, which constitutes the explanation of an effect. Bunge notes that in “highly complex systems” multiple mechanisms can exist alongside one another as “concurrent” or “parallel” mechanisms, often in conditional hierarchies of operation, and yet  all necessary (ibid., 193). For instance, “a walking brain engages in a number of parallel processes—​ biochemical, vascular, cognitive, emotional, and motor-​controlling” (ibid.). The processes of concurrent mechanisms can be tightly bound together. Energy delivery systems, such as a network of oil pipelines, are a mechanism to transfer energy from energy-​rich areas to energy-​poor areas and (often if not always) as a mechanism of geo-​economic inclusion of friends and exclusion of foes. In countries with large military industries, such as the United States, arms manufacturing is a central mechanism of existential security of the nation and a mechanism to increase employment favored by politicians to bring jobs “back home” and a mechanism to create client-​ patron relationships with other nation-​states. Parallel mechanisms thus can be analyzed according to their “essential” and “non-​essential” functions of the system, the latter because other mechanisms could play the same role, while the former are “peculiar” to a system (ibid.). Energy delivery systems deliver energy; multiple mechanisms can promote geo-​economic relations. In addition, Bunge also notes (ibid., 185)  the function of “metamechanisms,” i.e. mechanisms to enable or constrain the effects of other (lower-​ level) mechanisms. For example, governmental attempts to regulate domestic and international economic relations can be a powerful metamechanistic tool. Free-​trade agreements facilitate market efficiency in terms of the mechanism of “comparative advantage,” and trade barriers and currency devaluations

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Philosophical materialism 53 are mechanisms to punish enemy countries or protect domestic producers. In this sense, the United Nations, like most “global governance institutions,” was inaugurated as a political metamechanism to ameliorate international conflict and promote peace. In the social world, generative mechanisms derive from concrete social systems composed of “constituents” (subject-​ agents, built environments, and social forms). Subject-​agents compose social structures in the form of social institutions, groups, associations, etc. with relatively fixed positions attaching particular powers, obligations, and liabilities. They are constituted chiefly by their internal relations to each other, forming enduring social forms such as families, landlords/​renters, business corporations, and the Catholic Church. Social systems operate in a context of external relations with its geohistorical setting of ideological, socioeconomic, ethico-​ political, and material-​cultural features, all of which have specific generative mechanisms in operation that causally interact with the system (and are why systems contradict and countervail other causal powers in the social field, or compile into multiple-​or overdeterminations of each other). Emerging from systems are generative mechanisms, viz., causal powers effecting intended and unintended consequences, functioning within the social, cultural, political, and economic spheres of human societies. Bunge give examples of general types of social mechanisms which effect “cooperation, competition, mediation, and debate” (ibid., 183). While markets are mechanisms to facilitate the open exchange of goods and services, as Schumpeter noted, the “creative destruction” of innovation is a primary mechanism of capitalist accumulation. Democracy is a mechanism to “resolve the problem of societal decision-​making among conflicting interest groups with minimum force and maximum consensus” (ibid., 185, quoting Lipset 1959, 92). The globalization of production and consumption and technological developments are both proposed as mechanisms for income inequality. “Participation” is the central mechanism for “social cohesion,” and “marginalization” is a mechanism of “exclusion” (ibid., 204). War, of course, is a political mechanism by other means. In addition, nation-​states have mechanisms to effect social control (police, courts, and prisons), cultural diffusion (libraries, media, and schools), and governmentality (quantitative analysis and regulation of the nation’s “biopower”). In the nuclear family system, typical mechanisms include “domestic chores, marital encounters of various kinds, and child rearing” (ibid., 189). Unintended consequences of these mechanisms include emotional trauma, physical violence, and economic collapse. Counseling, church programs, and government policy are converse mechanisms to mitigate these pathologies because, for all systems, “if any of the mechanisms break down, so does the system” (ibid.). The ontological reality of systems and mechanisms has a crucial epistemological value that overlaps with the DCR intransitive-​transitive distinction. Mechanisms impart a “reality check” on the slant of knowledge entwined

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54  Philosophical materialism by interpretations, moods, cultural perspectives, phenomenalist “noematic” structures, or grids of intelligibility. Consider the many possible approaches to an “apple.” Subjects can perceive it in artistic terms (by a poem, painted picture, photograph), in commercial terms (production cost, market value, profit margin), in terms of “foodies” (taste, texture, variety), in relation to endurance sports (calories, glycemic index, electrolytes), in symbolic terms (autumn, forbidden fruit, eternal youth), and so on. Nonetheless, in terms of explanation, the mechanisms responsible for manifestations of apples (incorporating to a great degree the abstract necessities of hackberry trees, discussed above) are not subject to perspectivalism, cultural differences, or different attitudes. How human beings grow, understand, represent, or make use of apples is one matter, and a question of social mechanisms; explaining the nature of apples is another. Scientific understanding of an apple can be incomplete or wrong, but the search for mechanisms in terms of causal laws of flora, genetics, species-​specific properties, etc. are mind-​independent processes with their own truth value. DCR ontology is predicated on the fact “there are no lawless mechanisms any more than there are mechanism-​less patterns” (ibid., 199). The ubiquity of mechanisms responsible for processes in the world of comings and goings, operations and transformations, is discovered by substantive scientific research. Unless by “miracle,” generative mechanisms—​some known, many unknown in their regress or by their complexity—​are responsible for the present “state of affairs” in the universe. Likewise for the transience of human history. Generative mechanisms are responsible for all phenomena revolving around human subjects, both the (ontologically independent) natural and (ontologically dependent) social domains of the world.26 Generative mechanisms constitute the “real” underneath the “actual” domain of their manifestation as entities, events, processes, consciousness, agency, structures, and cultural forms. Events such as great discoveries, market crashes, and epidemics, entities such as nation-​ states, oligarchies, and the National Basketball Association, and processes such as exploitation, financialization, and “microaggression” come into being in time and human history. While many histories of “great humans” focus on conspicuous social revolutions, wars, technologies, political movements, etc.—​mostly on the ash heap—​la longue durée of structures, beliefs, and practices embedded deep in the minutiae of everyday life and seemingly incorrigible in their determinations, is foundational to the social world, and inevitably comes to pass.

Dialectics: from being to becoming The preceding sections have focused on basic ontological features of reality across the natural and social world. The dialectical turn taken by DCR incorporates basic critical realist precepts while expanding DCR philosophical ontology through the addition of temporality.27 In essence, dialectics concerns the nature of change in the world—​that “being” is always a “becoming” in a

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Philosophical materialism 55 world of ineluctable process, transformation, and openness. In fear and denial of this fact, DCR argues, the Western philosophical project since Plato posited the “realm of ideal forms” has largely centered on discovering an immovable and unchanging foundation of reality: a false succor to humankind given by the imagination for the illusion of certitude and security.28 DCR also argues the shelter of immutable form from the storm of open flux is motivated to protect socioeconomic systems predicated on unequal social relations by defending the status quo from change. The DCR emphasis on the temporality of being and inevitability of change unveils the causal power of “real determinate absence” as an ontological feature of the world. Following Alan Norrie’s point (2010, 161), a denial of absence in favor of pure presence and positivity—​ontological monovalence—​is the driving ideological presumption decrying absence and thus denying change. For DCR, this “primordial failing of Western philosophy” begins with Parmenides’ fear of the implications of Heraclitean flux. If the river Heraclitus steps into is forever changing, how can human minds know the world other than by its flux? By banishing absence as change in favor of pure positivity of being, Parmenides bequeaths to Plato and the history of philosophy the central problem:  in a world of apparent flux, where everything appears to be in process, what is universal, eternal, and unchanging—​what is true? By sequestering “real determinate absence” outside the boundary of the real as an explicit ontological feature of the world, the causal efficacy of absence and its effects is substituted by some other “positive” transcendent (God, forms, idea, etc.), operating “behind the scenes” in this world of mere appearances and handed the power of making reality in its stead. Returning to the Heraclitean river, DCR revitalizes the immutability of process, absence, and change but not the error of radical flux. Parmenidean hyperbole is laid aside, and the Heraclitean natural world is reconsidered. Any “change” presupposes an existent state of affairs of being that acts as both the condition of possibility for change and boundary conditions of possible change:  a peppercorn can change into a vine or a spice; it cannot change into a chicken. Change is a combination of two processes:  the negation of “what was” is simultaneous to the emergence of “what is.” Being and non-​ being is, consequently, a becoming and a be-​going. Moreover, it is precisely the agent (or mechanism) of “change” that is the ontological question, not the reification of a “form” in denial of its emergence. Change is thus continuous and discontinuous in virtue of causal mechanisms to effect real determinate absence responsible for a world of becoming.

The four moments of dialectical critical realism The primary rival to DCR materialist dialectic is Hegel’s idealist dialectic, which grants ontological priority to the conceptual and ideational content of both individual and collective forms of consciousness. In the idealist dialectic, reason is brought to bear to “think out” or “out-​think” social contradictions

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56  Philosophical materialism in a totalizing, universal movement of history to engender synthesis and wholeness. Ultimately, for Hegel, this process leads to the end of history, when the conceptual becomes fully developed and truth becomes transparent to human rationality. Contrary to idealist dialectics, and following Marx’s dialectical scheme, DCR “develops a line of thinking that links modern social forms not to their representation in a universalizing dialectic but rather to their material generation in social processes” (Norrie 2010, 66). For DCR, differences and logical contradictions do not originate from “bad thinking,” incomplete concepts, and irrational collective representations, but are symptomatic of social-​structural contradictions (inequalities, power differentials, the clash of vested interests), which are only settled through transformative praxis garnered by reflexive awareness. DCR stresses the “real” is not the “Rational,” but rather the generative mechanisms and causal structures underlying social processes. The dialectical idealist wager that contradictions are transcended by conceptual development and a change in consciousness will inevitably fail to address the real, material conditions that generate social dis-​order. The idealist has the “right idea” but has identified the wrong causal mechanism in the ontology of change. While it is true that reasons have causal efficacy, and concepts and ideas are central to human existence, thinking and contemplation are only one element in a broader dialectical framework. Hegel mistook a part for a whole and committed the epistemic fallacy by arguing ideas have a greater reality than their referents. Idealist philosophical systems cannot think away social problems in lieu of subject-​agents doing away with these problems through intentional causality and praxis to transform social structures and cultural forms, precisely because of the enduring, intransitive features of society that preexist and precondition possibilities for human consciousness and praxis. Against the ontology of the idea as the prime mover of historical change, and grounded in the natural necessity of an intransitive reality, the DCR dialectical schema analytically divides the process of “space-​time causality” of being into four basic facets (or “moments”) that incorporate basic critical realist precepts into a larger ontological totality. The four moments are non-​ identity, absence, totality, and the transformative praxis of human agency. Brought together, ontological features of being (in terms of natural necessity, depth ontology, stratified reality, and totality) are embedded into processes of becoming (in terms of change, absence, and praxis). Consequently, dialectics as an epistemology to understand the world mirrors a dialectical ontology of being and becoming, of difference and change. This chapter so far has focused on features of reality that correspond to the “first moment” of DCR dialectics. The social and natural worlds with their “relatively enduring” mechanisms and causal structures in time and space constitute an intransitive domain separate from transitive knowledge about being. In avoidance of the epistemic fallacy, the non-​identity of subject and object is the “starting point” given by basic critical realism for subsequent development through a philosophical account of the nature of change (Norrie 2010, 13).

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Philosophical materialism 57 The centrality of the “second moment”—​absence as change (and its various forms, including negation, non-​being, contradiction, finitude, and error)—​ will be the primary focus of my explication of the dialectical aspect of DCR, with a much briefer discussion of totality. Each moment in the dialectic has a corresponding form of causal power that is emergent, transfactual, and justified by the causal criterion. The first moment has focused on the causal efficacy of generative mechanisms and structures. The second moment focuses on the power of negation (absence) in processes of change. The third fronts the power of holistic causality in bidirectional relations of parts to totalities (wholes) and reciprocal effects of a totality on its constituents. Last is the causal power of human agency in virtue of reflexive deliberation and recursive praxis, grounding the capacity for individual and social transformation. The emancipatory arch-​project of DCR centers on human agency to remove (to absent) constraints on freedom in solidarity with all others.

Absence and negativity: change is a-​coming For DCR, the synchronic constitution of being is simultaneously a diachronic reproduction and transformation of being. Entities and structures incorporate the natural necessity of being (of their dispositions, causal efficacy, power of agency, etc.) and yet are never divorced (except analytically or experimentally) from the processes that subject them to the unrelenting change of becoming and be-​going. In broad analytical terms, materialist dialectics is grounded in a “fourfold polysemy of being”:  of product, process, product in process, and process in product. The multiform unpacking of being displays in ontological terms why process is essential to “being” just as product is to “becoming.” DCR holds the world is a “product in process” and a “process in product.” On the one hand, for example, human beings are in a state of constant and pervasive change, biologically, socially, and psychologically—​a “product” in the process of change. On the other, human beings are part of the natural world governed by biological evolution and the forces that drive it. Humans are also brought to being through their enculturation and socialization in specific geohistorical and sociocultural milieus, all of which instance diachronic emergence—​a variety of “processes” changing a product. And it is a unique feature of humankind to transform their milieus (products in process) through their reflexive deliberations and recursive practices (processes in product). Products and processes under consideration are thus tied intimately to generative and agential mechanisms, whose causal efficacy is responsible for synchronic emergence of products and the processes of their diachronic transformation within the natural and social worlds. For DCR, the “tri-​unity of causality in space and time” forms the “material meshwork in which becoming and process are understood alongside being and product” (Norrie 2010, 51). The relationship between being and becoming requires a philosophical account of “change.” For DCR, however, there is a conceptual block, arising from idealist tendencies (as “primordial failing”) in Western philosophy of

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58  Philosophical materialism ontological monovalence. The “prior denial of absence in favor of a purely positive account of reality” has as a negative consequence: “the denial of the possibility of real change in the world” raises only “difference” as the essential philosophical problem to be solved (ibid., 160–​61). The ontological problem revolves around the relation between “change” and “difference” as they manifest in the world. Both concepts entail forms of “absence,” but there is an ontological distinction between difference and change that must be made explicit. Difference and radical alterity are ubiquitous features of a world filled with a wide range of different phenomena, including flora, fauna, geological features, and human consciousness. The ascription of a difference as an “absence” is predicated on aspects of non-​identity of a “thing, context, or situation” to other things (including to itself) in terms of diversity and distinction. A philosophical system only concerned with difference devolves into an “analytic” enterprise to break the world down in terms of its discrete differences. DCR holds that change is also ubiquitous and “entails continuity (as well as disjunction) in a thing, a context, or a situation” in terms of metamorphosis and alteration (ibid., 163). Dialectical philosophy, in contrast to analytic frameworks, seeks to understand in formal terms the nature of change. In a positive, monovalent world, however, without absence, negation, and non-​ being, the result is the reduction of processes of change to instances of sheer difference, which is driven by a prior commitment to positivity. The philosophical tendency is to transpose the “product” of change into a relationship of non-​identity to its prior state. Differences that result from “a change” are perceived not as the outcome of a process of negation, but rather are perceived (analyzed) only in positive terms of its newfound particularity. The sheer positivity of being implied by ontological monovalence does not allow that every birth is a death, generation is destruction, and transformation is abandonment—​“an absenting of what was previously there” (ibid., 216). Without a concept of “absence,” processes of change are not countenanced, explicitly theorized, and brought into a complete ontological account of the natural and social worlds. DCR argues, on the contrary, change and difference are both real features of the world. Some differences can be traced to a process of change, such that a change “entails difference, but is not reducible to it” (ibid., 162). Things change and become different to themselves in some aspects while continuing in others. On the flip side, differences can be a mark of stark ontological alterity—​real differences in the world not traced to change. Scientists can examine different things and ask if they have a relationship. On the one hand, dogs and horses are different but have a relationship to a common ancestor, such that the differences of dogs and horses are derived from a process of evolutionary change. On the other, horses and polar ice caps are different and have only a truistic relationship of copresence on earth—​their differences are not explained by changes of one in relation to the other, but by real differences entailed by natural necessity and the stratification of reality.

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Philosophical materialism 59

Flux versus Form: transcending the antithesis DCR holds the inaugural moment of the reduction of change to difference begins with Parmenides, who theorizes a purely positive world without “generation of the new and the perishing of the old” (Norrie 2010, 164). Moreover, Bhaskar argues, “the history of Western philosophy can be largely seen as the quest for an unhypothetical starting point, something unconditional and one,” to ground the apparent world of flux, change, and annihilation, and to do away with any ontological implications of generation, change, and destruction (2008b, 354). The problem of “flux” is the starting point for Western philosophy. In the existential world of unceasing change, what principle, form, or foundation operates as an unquestionable ground of being? Parmenides’ solution, the “Parmenidean whole” of reality as an undifferentiated, singular, eternal, and unchanging universe, is clearly “untenable” as an ontological position because it does not allow the possibility for differences among things (Norrie 2010, 165). The Parmenidean axiom of pure, undifferentiated being, nonetheless, set the stage for Plato, who attempts to accommodate difference in the world without the “absurd conclusions” the Parmenidean denial of difference entails (ibid., 166). Plato’s solution is “to tame difference in the flux of phenomena through identity in the Forms” (ibid., 189). The realm of ideal forms operates as eternal and unchanging “prototypes” or “true presentations” of all worldly manifestations, however degraded and differentiated the latter are. The apparent flux of “things changing in time” is transposed into a more stable relationship of discrete material things to an ideal form: non-​being as difference in terms of identity displaces non-​being as absence in terms of change. The role of “forms,” for Plato, consequently provides an unchanging singularity, which gives ontological support to all its manifestations—​a relationship of the one and the many. All entities in their particulars (chairs, killer whales, blades of grass) and values (the good, the true, the beautiful) ultimately are granted their “truth” by an ideal and eternal form. The problem, as DCR argues, is the question of the one and the many “occludes” the more fundamental “terrain of the one and the other, where the issue of absence as change is raised” (ibid., 188, italics mine). The relationship between the one and the other is predicated on real determinate absence in both senses of non-​identity (Jersey cows and coffee cups) and change (the becoming of spring is the be-​going of winter). The ontology of “one and the other” (1) invites speculation over possible relations between things; (2) raises the question of the precise mechanisms underlying the change of one thing into another; (3)  indicates that “being” and “becoming” are both essential ontological features of the world, symbiotic yet not reducible to one another; (4) shows the “relationship between structured being and becoming” underlies the interdependence of synchronic and diachronic processes of emergence (ibid., 212).

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60  Philosophical materialism The relationship of one and the other is fully immanent to the world without recourse to an ideal or otherworldly domain to secure “being.” The immanence of processes of change and irreducible differences in the world does not entail an ontology of pure “flux and impermanence” (ibid., 168). The realist philosophical ontology of depth, natural necessity, and stratification entails that “the possibilities for absence and change must always be grounded in what already exists. This is the case even for the radically new, which may emerge de novo, but not without ground, ex nihilo” (ibid., 204). The Platonic fear of flux is ungrounded because the possibilities of “becoming” are always structured, conditioned, and/​or constrained by “being.” With a realist ontology in hand, the problem of flux and form dissolves precisely because the philosophical terrain laid out by Parmenides and Plato hypostatized a radical “flux” of becoming, which necessitates an antidote of greater strength—​and hence the traditional recourse to an all-​powerful mind, imposing order—​as Bhaskar describes, “the history of philosophy as that of explicit idealism and implicit realism” (2008b, 308). The philosophical problems generated by ontological monovalence and the epistemic fallacy are only continued by Cartesian and Kantian “rationalist” epistemologies and their postmodern offshoots. Western philosophy, in great part, is the history of finding the “solution” to the mystery the privation of “absence” has inflicted. Without an account of absence, change, and generative mechanisms—​to account for being and becoming—​convenient fictions are postulated to fill their role. The rationalist solution posits a “mind universal” to support and give the world its forms to counter the implications of flux. Tripped up by the ontological monovalence of being, grounded in mind-​ body substance dualism, and in opposition to pure becoming, foundations for knowledge and sociopolitical order are sought in the “mind.” Either God is “thinking” the world (Plato, Aristotle, Berkeley, etc.), or God is necessary to backstop the world that human beings “think” (the Cartesian ego in virtue of the cogito, and Kant’s transcendental idealist grid of space, time, and causality). Purely positive accounts of being must locate a foundation of being that is eternal, universal, and unchanging—​and this, in view of the transience and multiplicity of the world, is why forms, God, and the like are posited as the rock to which humankind clings for their knowledge, value-​ethics, and political order. The stability of ideal being has priority over the degraded world of real being as pathological, imperfect, unrealized, or “originally sinful.” Once “God is dead,” and no longer a viable principle (viz., causal power) for respectable “modern” philosophical systems, philosophy is left in a bind and on the royal road to subjective idealism, skepticism, and solipsism. Without a God or an external “reality” to vouchsafe the transient world, rationalist philosophies begin the steep slide toward resolving the “world” as a product of human minds—​immanent idealist grids of sociocultural constructionism, will to power, etc. The same Platonic terrain is presupposed by neo-​Nietzschean and poststructuralist philosophy, seeking to overturn the hegemony of “truth,” of form, of “being,” by privileging their opposite: difference and multiplicity.

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Philosophical materialism 61 The philosophical and political programs of social change, liberation, and rejection of outmoded “truth regimes” may be laudable, but for ontologists of flux, their “abstract and undifferentiated ontology…[does not disclose] the nature or conditions of actual change” in a stratified world of natural necessity (ibid., 204). Becoming is not reducible to discrete moments of difference at the surface. Becoming is grounded in a depth ontology of causal mechanisms that negate present states for new states in the generation, transformation, and destruction of being. The epistemic fallacy, in all these cases, presumes that an idealist derivation or “mind ontology” consigns the ultimate responsibility for “being” to a formal cause of epistemic constitution, collapsing being into the mind of “somebody,” whether of God, a transcendental consciousness, a patriarchal-​racist-​heteronormative-​nature-​exploiting ideology, or the “mind over matter” prescriptions of the self-​help movement. The antithesis of ideal form and worldly flux is superseded because “real absence is always this-​ worldly, and in a developing, determinate world the possibilities for absence and change must always be grounded in what already exists” (ibid.).29 The alternative tack to rationalism is Humean empiricist ontology, which collapses the real into the actual, and thus into the empirical domain of experiences. Knowledge, consequently, is grounded (justified as potentially true) only in terms of human-​centered experience of “impressions.” Empiricism, like rationalism, is locked into a flat, actualist ontology of surface and appearance. If “mind-​power” of God or “Man” is repudiated as causally co-​responsible for constructing reality, all that remains is the passive reception of sense data and their assembly into knowledge by the “reductionist analysis of laws as constant conjunctions of events” (ibid., 180). Hume’s actualist-​ empiricist ontology of constant conjunctions is the last-​ditch attempt to secure knowledge production by the induction of experience into general principles. If causal laws are collapsed into the events they govern, reality is compressed onto a “flat screen” of discrete events, knowable only in terms of the micro-​, macro-​, and telo-​“scopes” of human experience. The temporal dimension of causality eliminates the recognition of synchronic emergence of natural necessity as a constitutive form of causality. Flat, actualist ontologies do not reach below to the causal structures operating in service to higher levels, as the “real” causal mechanisms that condition both the necessity and possibility of manifest “events” in the open world. The empiricist worldview consequently devolves into a mechanistic event determinism of cause and effect, such that “positive knowledge” can only consist of empirically validated “conventions” of regular causal sequences, marked by their contiguity in space and time. Constant conjunctions as the marker of “natural laws” undergird the reductionist enterprise across the natural and social sciences, which construes higher levels of reality (of dispositions and causal powers) as either epiphenomenal of, or identical with, lower-​level microstructures. Without a theory of synchronic emergence and natural necessity, conjunctions at lower levels are given explanatory priority because the model for constant conjunctions does not cover the “constitutive”

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62  Philosophical materialism form of causality understood as emergence. This philosophical conceit is not borne out in the scientific enterprise (biologists do not consider their work as applied chemistry), and if not, science must explicitly theorize its ontology—​ the task of the realist philosophical ontology of DCR. In contrast, the “empirical criterion” of ontological actualism only “sees” conjunctions and induces causal regularities, while the “causal criterion” of ontological realism “grounds” science as the pursuit of emergent causal mechanisms operating transfactually across all levels of reality. Epitomes of the empiricist reduction remain in the dominant explanatory models of consciousness and methodological individualist theories of society. In the reductionist logic, consciousness can only be empirically located in the microstructure of the brain, and society can only be located in the actions of individuals. Because they are non-​empirical (no one can behold, measure, or place in a test tube a consciousness or a society), consciousness and social forms are pronounced inert, epiphenomenal, and/​or mere heuristic devices. Counter to idealist and empiricist tendencies in Western philosophy, DCR provides an explicit realist philosophy of ontological depth, predicated on the causal powers of generative mechanisms and real, determinate absence, operating transfactually throughout all layers of reality, and responsible for manifestations of change and becoming. For DCR, “negativity or absenting lie at the core of a dynamic, caused world in which nothing stands still, and everything is in process” (ibid., 216). Moreover, it is precisely the entailment that “the denial of nonbeing [absence] involves the denial of the possibility of real change in the world” that forms the ideological bulwark for entrenched forms of power in the world (ibid., 160). But it is a caused world, and not by an evil genius or as effects jetting out of an unknowable “noumenal” realm, and/​or reduced to the actual and conflated with human experience. The depth ontology of causal processes and mechanisms responsible for process and change in both the natural and social worlds is consistently unknown, unrealized in open systems, and unobserved. Despite the obfuscatory nature of “real” causal mechanisms and structures, the scientific endeavor for both the natural and social is to discover their constitutive powers, and most importantly for the social world, social powers and mechanisms can be transformed through human praxis.

The agency of absence Essential to processes of change within the “tri-​unity of causality in space and time” is the causal power of absence. Mechanisms as “agents of change” or as “capacities to do” have at their core a power—​in the most abstract sense—​to negate or absent past states to effect emergent new states. For DCR, the centrality of absence to dialectical processes is twofold. First, it brings to light a world full of absences, in the ontological sense that every “presence” in the world necessitates the “absence” of other possibilities. The presence of concrete pavement is the absence of trees; the presence of dryness is the absence

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Philosophical materialism 63 of wetness; the presence of poverty is the absence of wealth. Second, absence is implicated in all instances of change of one thing into another. Aging is the absence of prior states of youth; entropy is the absence of the (re)creation of order; the acquisition of knowledge is the absence of ignorance. Change is thus a “becoming” to a new emergent state of being, which is simultaneously a “be-​going” of past states of being. Most significant, Bhaskar asserts that change as a process of “absenting” is a universal existential human orientation that strives to overcome “constraints on the absenting of absences or ills” (2008b, 396, italics mine). In other words, dialectics as the “pulse of freedom” of humanity is the process by which subject-​agents overcome any structural obstacles (environmentally, politically, socially, and/​ or economically) that hinder their ability to eliminate existential threats (the “absence” of food, water, housing, safety, etc.) and find as many inviolable spaces of personal transcendence (in the face of the “absence” of occupations, hobbies, and activities in which they can express unfettered agency of self-​determination and self-​creation that is meaningful, self-​satisfying, etc.). The impulse to surmount constraints on the ability of subject-​agents to absent their “absences” in life has a further implication. Individual existence is intrinsically tied to social existence in virtue of the fact efficacious and meaningful activity at the personal level is presupposed by, and conditioned by, interpersonal relations to larger social-​structural totalities (whose effects flow from the past, present, and future). It is only through instances of social solidarity that agents are able to act to absent absences (starting at birth with a “primal scream” for care). The ethical core of DCR is thus centered on a premise that a theory-​practice inconsistency is in effect whenever differentials of social power are instituted that privilege the interests of a nation, ethnicity, caste, identity, etc. to the detriment of the outside “other.” Human differences of sex, phenotype, and family lineage do not provide a rational or scientific basis for the institutionalization of social hierarchies. Individual differences of psychological disposition, intelligence, and creativity are thus enabled to flourish, in principle, to the benefit of all. DCR recognizes that the dialectic to freedom is only instantiated in concrete, geohistorical situations, which profoundly mediates how the “impulse” actualizes (and all variations of its repression). The philosophical anthropology of DCR is grounded in a premise of an explicit “human nature” that labors to “absent absence” in service to greater freedom. The necessity of “trust” and “solidarity” to human material existence provides the basis or “reality principle” as an intransitive fact of the human condition. The natural necessity of the overarching disposition to freedom imposes on all subject-​agents the “universalization of their practical commitments, towards ethical commitments” such that “the freedom of each is achieved only through the freedom of all” (Norrie 2010, 17).30 The ground of this open teleology is “based on the core human equality derived from our shared species-​being, and orientated to the processes of human flourishing in the context of concern for future generations, other species, and nature generally,” or in other words, a state of eudaimonia (ibid., 179).

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A world of totalities The realist philosophical ontology so far developed in this chapter has focused on the nature of being as non-​identity (of parts, wholes, their relationships, synchronic emergence, and causality) and on the nature of becoming as absence (negation, change, and diachronic emergence). The third “moment” of DCR dialectics, that of totality, develops a broad view of all different types and forms of being and becoming that constitute a world full of entities, structurata, and structures.31 As a general definition, totalities are “internally related grounded ensembles,” and by its generality, this suggests “totality is everywhere” (Norrie 2010, 89). The ubiquity of totalities in the world necessitates a philosophical account of general forms of “connectedness” that constitute totalities. There are two most prevalent relationships of parts to wholes. The first is that of existential constitution, whereby “essential and intrinsic” parts form wholes (ibid.). Accordingly, for Bhaskar, “dialectical connections” “between entities or aspects of a totality…are in principle distinct but inseparable” because their internal relations are existentially constitutive of the totality, either “synchronically or conjunctually” (2008b, 58). These connections can be “absolute, epochal, structurally periodic, conjunctural, or momentary” (ibid.). These relations account, for example, for the emergence of chemical and cellular structures from lower-​level structures, the mutual constitution of social relations (parent-​child, master-​slave, etc.), and all the words in the English language at a given conjunction in time. The second is a relation of intra-​permeation of totalities by non-​essential and extrinsic elements that influence, interact, or condition a totality. “Wholes” are analyzed in terms of their external relationships (to context/​ environment) as their counterfactual conditionals for actualization in an open and contingent world. Interest rates and the price of housing and energy are not essential features to a family but can have profound effects on their well-​being and choices. Fire is extrinsic to forest ecology but can be vital to the revitalization and adaptability of a forested area beset by drought, disease, and other environmental pressures. An individual subject-​agent brings together intrinsic biological, psychological, and social dimensions to form the totality of a “person,” while people are conditioned by extrinsic contexts and structural realities that profoundly permeate and shape their subjectivity and capacities for agency. Totalities thus imply both a “coming together” and “differentiation” of parts and wholes characterized by essential internal relations and the possibility for non-​essential external relations to other totalities, and the entities, processes, and events other totalities manifest (Norrie 2010, 87). Totalities are neither grounded nor structured by reason or thought (pace Hegel, neoconservative ideology, and Platonism). Rather, they exist by virtue of the material meshworks of their space-​time existence, grounded in natural necessity and by the causal powers criterion. Consequently, totalities are materialistically diffracted such that “what initially appears a unitary phenomenon

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Philosophical materialism 65 is fractured into different shapes and patterns or is fragmented into a range of different elements” (ibid., 50). The materialist dialectic recognizes that the “given” of the world as atomistic and unitary is an “abstraction,” over-​coding the multiplicity of constitutive and relational features that consolidate into entities, structures, and the larger networks, systems, and totalities they participate within (or are “constellationally embedded” within).32 The dialectical approach to substantive research of totalities investigates the extent of potential internal and external relations and the causal effects brought into play by their confluence. Moreover, DCR stresses that totalities are never closed, complete, or final. Totalities are always open to permeation and liable to change via diachronic emergence in a world that is “structured and in open systematic flux” (ibid., 92, italics Norrie’s). The temporality of being as a be-​going and the ontological fact of real determinate absence in the world entail that reality remains in process. Grand totalities of nature, history, polity, enlightenment, and truth (including DCR philosophy) are never ultimate, perfected, or resolved.

Detotalization and retotalization: the politics of change As totalities are never closed, remaining open to processes of change, permeation, reformation, deformation, etc., the key transformations of totalities are the parallel processes of detotalization and retotalization. Processes of detotalization, for example, lead to fragmentation, fissure, and contradiction, which create subtotalities existing in tension to other subtotalities within a larger “totality” or the potential for such. For example, most “social totalities” (the nation-​state system, nation-​states, subcultures, etc.) are divided by various sociological identities and positions (ethnonationality, religion, race, class, gender, caste, etc.) creating subtotalities of inclusion and exclusion. The “subject-​agent as totality,” likewise, can be plagued by physical maladies of hunger and sickness, and normally is plagued by division and heterogeneity of competing ego ideals, self-​defeating neurotic attachments, ethical inconsistencies, unacknowledged ignorance, etc. Dialectical philosophy is not neutral or ambivalent about potentials or outcomes for the “becoming” of human beings in geohistory. The first task is to identify the divisions and contradictions inherent to the industrialized, capitalist world system overlying the nation-​state system and other social and psychodynamic divisions. The second task is to move toward eliminating alienation by retotalizing divisions and contradictions across the personal, social, and natural spheres of existence. For Bhaskar, alienation—​“the estrangement of part or whole of one’s essence from one’s self ”—​is the “index” of all processes of detotalization, and spells the negation of wholeness and autonomy (2008b, 360). The environmental, social, and psychological conflicts inhering in processes of dehumanization and alienation are countermanded by retotalizations of the self, the other, and the nonhuman world. DCR thus is centrally focused on understanding and overcoming detotalizing tendencies of late modernity, which

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66  Philosophical materialism cut across the four existential relationships that compose the “concrete universality” of all human beings. The “four planes of being” in the materialist diffraction of human existence are (1)  the personal/​psychological spheres of stratified subjectivity (including subconsciousness, reflexivity, intentionality, and identity); (2) inter-​and intrasubjective relations of subject-​agents in interpersonal contexts (e.g., among family or friends, or in the workplace); (3)  “social relations at the non-​reducible level of structures, institutions, and forms” (e.g., positioning in hierarchies of class and gender, metropole-​ periphery, and economic world system); and (4) material relations between subject-​agents and nature (e.g., farming and fishing, pollution and urbanization) (Norrie 2010, 115). Detotalization, alienation, and loss of autonomy are engendered by relations of power that constitute fragmented relationships between subject-​agents and the self, other, and world. And it is through the power of human agency possibilities of retotalization are at hand.

Practical materialism: a world of making, saying, and doing The third principle of philosophical materialism, which corresponds to the fourth “moment” in critical realist dialectics, is that of praxis or practical materialism. This principle provides the staging ground for the remainder of this book, namely, that of outlining a unified social theory that accounts for the causal powers, and hence ontological status, of consciousness, agency, subjectivity, and social forms. The first two principles—​epistemic and ontological materialism—​provide a philosophical treatment of the natural world as inclusive of the social world. As people and the social world they create are ultimately emergent from the biological and physical strata of reality, such a foundational approach is warranted as a means to understand the transfactuality of powers operating at all levels of reality, as conditions of possibility for higher levels, and as the intransitive target-​domain for knowledge in the transitive domain. As knowledge is a “real” part of the world, with powers of truth and falsity for good and less good, it is also constellationally embedded in being but not reducible to being. This distinction informs the DCR insistence on untangling epistemological frameworks of knowledge production from ontological features of reality, constituted by the natural necessity of being that manifests entities, structures, and generative mechanisms. Narrowing the focus to the social world, philosophical materialism paves the way for arguments for the ontological reality (via the causal powers criterion) of human agency and social forms, both of which are intransitive and the basis for the DCR solution to the agent-​structure problem. Practical materialism postulates a constitutive role of human beings in the production and transformation of social and cultural life through their praxis. The causal efficacy of human agency is the ontological basis for this constitutive role, granted by the causal powers criterion of reality. In Bhaskar’s general formulation, the capacity for “agency” is granted to “anything which is capable of bringing about a change in something else (including itself)”

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Philosophical materialism 67 (2008a, 109). For human beings, their agential powers center on the development and pursuance of “projects” (which I will explore at length in chapter four) as they manifest in “practices.” In its most basic sense, praxis is the capacity for making, saying, and doing, whether of extraordinary practices such as ritualized events or everyday practices of “getting through the day.” The “practice of everyday life” requires many skills and knowledges that vary from context to context: how to fix a meal, drive a car, climb a social ladder, maneuver through a complex and possibly corrupt government bureaucracy, “get the best deal,” and so forth. People enter into social systems at birth, are enabled to be “human” by their enculturation while “making do” with a set of constraints given, and make their way in accordance with their beliefs and desires. However mundane, these activities must be accounted for in terms of agential and social-​structural ontology. To foreshadow arguments laid out in the remainder this book, human actions have constitutive powers in the reproduction and transformation of social and cultural systems, some intended, many unintended. As Bhaskar has put it, “people do not marry to reproduce the nuclear family or work to sustain the capitalist economy” as explicit intentions, but subject-​agents’ praxis, and the reasons they have families and get jobs, is the ontological basis for a system’s form and its reproduction (1998, 215). At the same time, human behavior is always preconditioned by the historical epoch of its instantiation, which provides the forms and means by which people can have a family and procure the necessities of life through mechanisms of exchange. Social systems provide the conditions of possibility for human agents to act in the world, and thus are ontologically real in terms of the causal criterion and an enduring intransitive domain by virtue of the natural necessity of their forms. DCR argues both agency and structure interlock in the reproduction and transformation of social and cultural formations. As such, agents are neither reducible as interpellated effects of structure—​the error of reification—​nor are structures epiphenomenal of agential behavior—​the error of volunteerism. I agree with Margaret Archer’s claim (2003, 190) that “human being is logically and ontologically prior to social being”: it is unthinkable to have existent social structures or cultural systems without people.33 However, a comprehensive theory of human agency without culture and social structure is unintelligible, because most of the powers and liabilities we associate with agency stem from “real-​world” positioning within social structures. Agents move through various sociocultural and occupational positions in the span of life. The powers and liabilities associated with such positions derive from the configuration of social relations that the positions are enmeshed within. Consequently, the formation of subjectivity as an embodied agent is developed through our positioning within a social milieu, and this process largely accounts for the meanings, beliefs, roles, values, and interests that subject-​agents hold. Practical materialism, however, is not a determinative or mechanistic materialism, giving rise to robotic subjects as ciphers of cultural determinants.34 Agents have intrinsic causal powers that grant them transformative powers—​which

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68  Philosophical materialism may or may not be actualized—​to effect changes in existing social structures and cultural formations through their intra-​and intersubjective negotiations and actions. Materialism does not axiomatically entail determinism, because the emergent power of human consciousness gives rise to the capacity of human agency in terms of reflexive deliberation over self-​direction. The natural necessity of the capacity for deliberation, while only actualized through social forms, operates at a lower stratum than the social.

Conclusion This chapter has focused on the essential building blocks of basic and dialectical critical realist philosophical positions. In the following chapters, I  draw on these themes to develop philosophical accounts of the higher-​ order strata of agency and structure, each of which have irreducible forms of causal power. At the same time, the interplay of agency and structure in the temporal unfolding of social reality necessitates a philosophical account of the linking mechanism that mediates their respective powers. In general, the constitutive role of human being in the production of social life rests on two assumptions or “double freedoms” that separate human beings from other animals. Namely, human beings are largely if not entirely free from instinctual determination, and in principle, subject-​agents have the capacity to transform the existential conditions of both their psychodynamics and social sphere. The range for the potential of agential transformation is “total”: the causal efficacy of human agency to “absent absences” at the individual level is simultaneous to the absence of constraints at the global level. The dialectics of retotalization across all sociocultural contexts involves the power of “relatively enduring” social forms, the process of social reproduction and transformation, and the axiological-​ethical impulse to negate the force of alienation. As Marx said famously in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. (Marx 1978, 595) The pursuit of freedom, the rejection of socially sedimented power relations, the absence of ills, all the various social and political movements that seek retotalization of humanity in greater accord with the earth’s biosphere are projects in need of an explicit ontological account of human being in a world of natural necessity and causal powers materialism. The DCR task is to establish a unified philosophy—​displacing outmoded, irrealist, and idealist systems. The DCR argument is to foreground

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Philosophical materialism 69 explicitly an intransitive depth ontology of emergence, stratification, and the transfactuality of causal mechanisms and structures to provide a realist ontology of the “actual” that accounts for the total manifestation of the natural and social worlds. The DCR revolution rises from the ground whence “self-​orientated desire and other-​orientated solidarity are brought together, and shown to inform each other, leading to the potential trajectory of eudaimonia” (Norrie 2010, 141). The first step in DCR philosophical anthropology is to locate the ontological foundation of human agency in consciousness of a self (the “I”) who exists in time, constituted by memory, present experience, and future orientation. In the following two chapters, “The ontology of consciousness” and “The ontology of subjectivity,” I will present arguments supporting the claims that (1) the capacities of human consciousness are synchronically emergent, transfactual, and transcultural, (2)  the structure of consciousness has an inherent and sui generis capacity for reflexivity, the central causal mechanism to mediate the independent and irreducible causal powers of human agency and social forms as they interlock in the reproduction and transformation of social reality. And within the ontology of human consciousness lies the power to negate our nightmares.

Notes 1 The three components of philosophical materialism will be discussed below. This chapter is orientated around Bhaskar’s definition of “materialism,” expounded in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Bhaskar 1999, 369–​73). 2 Consider the intransitive features of the human body. Humans (self-​) consciously embody their body, itself constituted by three foundational strata of physical, chemical, and biological mechanisms. Yet, allied to the biological body, which holds particular emergent powers, liabilities, and tendencies, is a fourth stratum, that of human consciousness (of sub-​, pre-​, and manifest forms of conscious experience), which holds additional emergent powers, defining homo sapiens in the larger animal kingdom, and, so far as human knowledge has extended, makes humans unique in the universe. 3 One of Nietzsche’s essential points (the mark of being “Nietzschean”) is that the philosophical knowledge quest toward “the truth” in the Western tradition is compromised by the preconditional and undefended valuation of “truth” as unquestionably a “good.” DCR argues Nietzsche misses the point because he commits the epistemic fallacy. For DCR, “the truth of things” is separate from the truth of propositions about things. DCR’s concept of alethic truth, in which “humans do not bring truth to the world, rather the world imposes its truth on us,” suggests there is an ontological truth of an intransitive domain of generative mechanism and causal structures, operating as a reality principle for all phenomena of the world (Hartwig 2007a, 26). Nietzsche seeks to supplant the otiose form of “truth” with a vitalizing ontology of “will to power” in light of the radical flux of becoming. The problem, as I will discuss below, is that the supposition of “radical ontological flux” fails to account for the conditions of being that always prefigure any change in time. The transience of even “relatively enduring” structures and

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mechanisms is sufficient for a realist philosophy. Propositions about reality can be “good” or “bad,” and what people think about reality can be true or false. However, the alethic truth of being is immune and unmoved by what we might think about it. 4 Bhaskar’s definition of experimental closure (like a test tube) as a primary method of scientific investigation: “A closure…depends upon either the actual isolation of a system from external influences or the constancy of those influences” (2008a, 74). 5 As Sayer (1998, 125)  notes, DCR “neither assumes an epistemically privileged observation language which guarantees correspondence to the real object nor falsely assumes that the lack of a theory-​neutral observation language means that observation is completely theory-​determined such that there can be no correspondence whatsoever.” “Truth” thus must retain a very small set of permanent scare quotes, but this does not entail a “performative contradiction,” such as when “wild eyed” skeptics proclaim, “the truth is, there is no Truth!” 6 For instance, on December 17, 2010, 26  year-​old Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after being slapped in the face by a Tunisian policewoman seeking a bribe. Bouazizi’s action, in part, provoked mass confrontation with authoritarian regimes across North Africa and the Middle East. 7 The term “emergence” has two distinct meanings. The common usage denotes historical emergence, with no implied ontological claim necessary, in the sense of some entity or process coming into existence at a particular time and place. For example, “fascist ideology emerged in the post-​World War I era as a viable political program out of debates over the perceived weakness of liberal democracy and dangers of communism. It appears to be emerging again in the 21st century with the rise of white identity politics in advanced economies.” In contrast, the theory of emergence examines the conditions of possibility for an ontological emergence of independent existent layers of reality and causal mechanisms that operate there. This second meaning informs the following: “social structures emerge from agential practice, becoming the conditions for the future reproduction and transformation of practice.” I will develop a theory of emergence later in this chapter. 8 It is true that some powers of entities or structures are a direct or unmediated expression of their categorical properties (in the sense of “self-​causing”): the radioactivity of plutonium, the destructive (and creative) power of molten lava, the fire-​ quenching ability of rain, the Great Wall of China as a barrier to movement, and so on. The powers and liabilities so expressed, however, require a basic condition in order for these powers to “do something” interesting and causally efficacious. Respectively, for instance, radioactivity must cause DNA replication miscues; lava must form new land mass; rain must extinguish a forest fire; the wall must repel Mongol invaders. The causal power of a thing requires something to affect: it must enter into a relationship with other things, otherwise the power remains unexpressed, impotent, or inert. Because entities generally are in relationships with other things in the world, their causal powers are either enabled or constrained by these relationships, a point repeated several times in the course of this book, and a central process in DCR philosophical ontology. 9 This is not to say the threat of border security does not exert causal power of constraint, dissuading potential alien invaders. In this case, the mere threat of enforcement, though unactualized in some obvious, actualized form, affects the projects and plans of potential transgressors. This issue will be discussed in greater detail in chapter four.

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Philosophical materialism 71 10 This explication of abstract necessities of trees remains incomplete. Constitutive elements of tree species include the evolutionary adaptation to environment in relation to geography (temperature, elevation, rainfall, etc.) and ecology (symbiotic relations with other flora and fauna). 11 Sartenaer (2015a, 1–​ 23) employs a distinction between “non-​ explainability” and “non-​predictability,” with the former the essential qualification for something to be an emergent novelty. In Sartenaer’s view, non-​explainability implies non-​predictability but not necessarily vice versa. He gives the example of a computer program that generates random sequences of numbers, which are thus “un-​ predictable” in principle and in practice (ibid., 17, footnote 11). However, the non-​predictability of the sequence remains liable to what he calls an “etiological” explanation, and hence does not qualify as a true emergent novelty by definition, because knowledge of the “emergence basis” (the hardware, software, and algorithm) fully explains that a “random sequence” will be created once the algorithm is set in motion by a direct intent to produce the sequence. In my analysis presented here, I  use the terms somewhat interchangeably, with the caveat that any reference to predictability and non-​predictability of the world of things, structures, events, etc. has lurking behind the terms the more stringent qualification of non-​ explainability as the crucible of emergence. The reason for this is that Sartenaer (2015b, 62–​68) only refers to non-​predictability as the qualification of emergent novelties, while he then (2015a, 1–​23) makes the more subtle distinction between non-​explainability and non-​predictability. 12 Here, Sartenaer refers to emergence as the “doctrine of emergent evolutionism” (2015b, passim). I have jettisoned his attachment of “evolutionism” to emergence to avoid unnecessary confusion. If I  understand correctly, “emergent evolutionism” was the term used by the grandfathers of emergence theory in the 1920s in order to conceptualize/​theorize the nature of Darwinian evolution (ibid., 64). In this light, emergent evolutionism could be considered a specialization of emergence theory proper. 13 With fully socialized human beings it is complicated: if any individual reference point in one’s constitution presupposes preexisting social structures that include reference (by internal relation) to the other they meet (a man and woman both involved in the “dating scene”, or a Jewish Israeli Zionist and Arab Israeli activist both motivated to “assert by virtue his politico-​historical rights”), then the new human relationship “XY” is “conditioned” by preceding “XY” social antecedents. However, what has preceded does not fully determine new relations. A chief claim of DCR, defended in this book (and examined in detail in chapter four), is that both agents and structures are emergent phenomena and interact causally to reproduce or transform themselves and their social milieu. 14 As shown above, Sartenaer’s use of the singular term “ontological determinism” becomes theoretically differentiated by the antithesis of “epistemic determinism” and “epistemic indeterminism” as they apply. His position of ontological determinism and epistemic indeterminism (entailing emergent novelties, which are not etiologically explainable, and hence not predictable) has “changed the meaning” of ontological determinism. In what follows, in a DCR terminological translation, the claim for “ontological determinism/​epistemic determinism” is regulative determinism, in contrast to Sartenaer’s position of “ontological determinism/​epistemic indeterminism” or ubiquity determinism (i.e. DCR’s position).

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72  Philosophical materialism 15 It is impossible, as far as I know, to analyze something that is not there—​has not emerged. People investigate ghosts and gods because they believe they have seen, felt, or experienced an effect of them (strange sounds from the attic; their prayers finally answered), however mistaken they are about the supernatural cause. Theoretical entities such as “dark matter,” despite not being “witnessed” directly, are suspected to exist because of various causal effects that are “witnessed,” and thus a retroduction (best hypothesis) is made as to the “matter” of the causal source. Forecasting and hypothetical reasoning bring future states into view; however, as the future is open, and speculation contingent on all conditions remaining equal, it is only after the fact of emergence that a justified and true causal explanation can be given. 16 The logic of primary and secondary novelties can be applied ubiquitously throughout the natural and social worlds. All flora and fauna can be identified as such. One interesting avenue for consideration, which I will only point to, is the relation between the primary novelty of human-​fashioned goods in comparison with the production of goods in Walter Benjamin’s “age of mechanical reproduction.” “Handmade goods” from arrowheads, to houses, to artworks might be reproduced, replicated, and modeled, but there remains significant contingency and variation in “artisan” production, which is more in line with the idea of “secondary novelty,” and which is lacking in industrial, factory-​line types of production. To go down this avenue slightly more, the “emergence” of test tube babies and the growing capacity for genetic engineering of life (designer babies, etc.) seems less novel and more mechanical. 17 Sartenaer’s theory of non-​compositional synchronic emergence—​of an intra-​ level relation between the emergent and emergence basis—​has affinity with John Searle’s account of consciousness, to be discussed in chapter three. To foreshadow the arguments to be presented, Searle uses the analogy of “solidity” and “liquidity” as emergent, macroscopic features of an underlying molecular structure as a way to grasp the nature of consciousness. Searle distinguishes between first-​person and third-​person accounts of consciousness while maintaining an adamant rejection of property dualism, reductionism, and eliminativism, all of which suffer in his view from the original sin of mind/​body “substance dualism.” The mind/​body categorical separation set the terms of the debate which continues to confuse many philosophers and neuroscientists, remnants of which are still visible in contemporary terms such as brain-​based “microproperties” and phenomenal “macroproperties” of consciousness, with the latter considered “not real.” If substance dualism is in error, reductionism thus appears the only option; hence the perennial failure to explain these “ghostly properties” away in terms of a third-​ person account without a theory of emergence. 18 Sartenaer bases his argument for the inextricable relationship of both forms in part on the philosophy of C. Lloyd Morgan, a prominent member of the British emergentist movement of the early 20th century. 19 It is worth noting the ontological status of “cognitive” entities—​beliefs, desires, ideologies, symbolic systems, language, etc.—​in terms of the theory of emergence so presented. The diachronic emergence of such entities is grounded in an emergence basis of social forms and people. The emergence basis for their synchronic emergence is exactly the same. These cognitive entities require human minds for their existence—​beliefs require believers; languages need speakers; symbols call for interpreters. Dead languages, unread books, and incomprehensible hieroglyphics

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20

21 22

23

24 25

retain their possibilities for cognitive actualization, and hence their causality, but must be “rethought” and continually so. The alternative is a radical reductionism to a zero point in time and space, eliminating novelty for either diachronic or synchronic emergence, with “absurd” results. If diachronic novelty (including evolution) is eliminated, every single entity, from human minds to grains of sand, “constitutively” in the universe (that was, is, and will be), is “vertically” determined by its own, individual emergence base. Because there is no historical novelty—​“every synchronic emergence would always be preceded by prior synchronic emergences, ad infinitum”—​what Sartenaer terms “fixist parallelism” (Ibid., p.  10. Italics, Sartenaer’s). If synchronic novelty is eliminated, every single level of reality, from quarks to consciousness, has been determined by independent causal antecedents, ad infinitum, operating as an emergence basis for each level. Because there is no synchronic novelty of higher order levels and its vertical relationships of constitution, it is unclear what maintains the “formal” consistency of a multi-​level entity, “up and down” its higher and lower levels, if each level is independently caused by its own emergent basis, back in time to “the beginning of it all.” For a brief overview of the debate, consult Choi and Fara (2018). “Counterfactual conditionals” are the conditions that enable categorical properties to manifest specific dispositions. For instance, the dispositional property of “fragility” entails the propensity of a glass to break if dropped from a sufficient distance, with sufficient velocity, and with sufficiently hard contact. The counterfactual conditional in this case is thus: “if a glass is dropped on the floor, it will break.” The disposition to shatter can also manifest in other ways:  a glass will break if stepped on—​“mazel tov!” Nonetheless, it might be the case—​such as for centuries-​old glassware—​the disposition to break has never actualized, and yet the categorical properties of the glass and its dispositional property of fragility have endured. The push to locate explanatory (causal) responsibility for macroscopic properties solely in terms of micro-​reduction bases is not merely an abstract philosophical debate, but can have real-​world consequences. Since 2014, the National Institute of Mental Health in the US only provides financial support to clinical researchers who “explicitly focus on a target such as a biomarker or neural circuit,” eliminating support for research that examines mental properties in relation to psychological processes, environmental stressors, and social contexts (Makari, 2015). In this case, “brain science” only occurs when macroscopic properties at the level of human behavior/​consciousness are explained in terms of “neuroanatomical and biochemical” micro-​reduction bases (ibid.). In virtue of Kistler’s argument, it is the case the open contingency of manifest dispositions of mental properties invites non-​reductive analysis of mental properties operating in the “real world.” As I discussed above, an instance where a categorical/​causal base is the same as the reduction base occurs by “intra-​level emergence.” It is common in the DCR literature to employ both terms, “generative mechanisms” and “causal structures.” In my mind, there is no essential difference between the two, and they could be used interchangeably to an extent. If there is a meaningful difference, it is a matter of perspective in the following way: take, for instance, the global nation-​state system. It is a structure that exerts causality in many different ways (organizes political control of space, sets up inviolable borders, differentiates people, and so on). Many different types of mechanisms are responsible for the

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74  Philosophical materialism creation of the nation-​state system (wars, ethnic cleansing, treaties, negotiations, anti-​colonial revolts, and so on). Once in place, however, the nation-​state could be considered a generative mechanism. It gives a set of people loosely connected by a combination of ethnonationalist, religious, and/​or linguistic similarities an identity and usually a right to self-​determination (even if it is a monarchy). As for the entire nation-​state system, what is its primary activity or mechanism, however accidental or contingent? I  would suggest its mechanism is an instance of “downward causation.” The nation-​state system enables states to have strategically useful “others,” whose existence is outside the “national community” bound by law, reciprocity, and identity. States are thus able to externalize problems (trade dumping, pollution and waste, unemployment), to colonize or neocolonize others for economic and/​or geopolitical advantages, and, perhaps most important, the existential threat of the other is an effective tool to maintain social order. 26 The transitive and intransitive domains of human existence can be redescribed in terms of generative mechanisms. Mechanisms of “knowledge production” and mechanisms of “reality production” slice the world differently than the distinction between the “natural world” and the “social world of human intentionality.” DCR ontology highlights intransitive mechanisms of consciousness, reflexivity, and collective intentionality, as well as existentially intransitive artifacts of human origin—​social structures and cultural forms—​an essential point to maintain ontological distinction between, and reality of, agents and structures. The problem with the distinction between the natural world and social world (and I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for reminding me) is that it breaks down in two fundamental ways, and thus elides the nature/​social “dichotomy.” (1) The social world is emergent from the biological/​natural world in the form of innate and emergent human capacities that presuppose the social; and (2), to be discussed in chapter eight, DCR argues that manifest human rights and virtue ethics are grounded in “human nature.” This (ontological) caveat bears on my use (in the next chapter) of John Searle’s distinction between nonhuman “ontologically objective” features of the world (like a tree) and human-​centered “ontologically subjective” features (like a soccer match) that might suggest this dualism. 27 My understanding of critical realist dialectics is primarily informed by Alan Norrie’s masterful work, Dialectic and Difference (2010). 28 The extent of such an illusion can be sublime to a level of astonishment. God is defined as omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and invisible. 29 For an excellent criticism of deconstruction/​ poststructuralism from a DCR perspective, I  refer readers to Alan Norrie’s explanation of the similarities and differences between DCR and two prominent “pomo” theorists, Derrida and Deleuze, in chapters six and seven of Dialectic and Difference (2010). Norrie begins his book with a quote from Heraclitus—​worth repeating—​which captures the essence of DCR: “In the same rivers ever different waters flow… we step and do not step into the same rivers.” Philosophers of flux and becoming ontologize the “not stepping” while failing to ontologize the preexisting structures responsible for the possibility of “stepping” in the first place. DCR ontology accounts for both. Aptly, Norrie quotes Heraclitus again: “latent structure is master of visible structure” (ibid., 208). 30 For example, the right to free speech for one becomes the right for all. 31 My overview of “totalities,” as has been the case for many of the key facets of DCR philosophy and social theory, is necessarily incomplete and condensed.

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Philosophical materialism 75 I have, however, attempted to provide essential points that support later chapters and their themes. 32 Norrie (2010, 88–​89) gives the example of a book as a “totality,” being a vastly complex social object, existentially constituted and permeated by a wide array of other social totalities. Books are bundles of words, each with an etymology and various denotations and connotations, whose meanings are generated by a referent and syntagmatic emplacement and paradigmatic associations. Words form sentences that evoke social identities of class, gender, education, historical epoch, etc., by virtue of the type of “voice” so constituted through the author’s choice of words (whether intentional or unintentional). Books are also constellationally embedded in larger systems of meaning:  as literature, pulp fiction, non-​fiction, propaganda, authoritative, etc. Books are always contextually embedded:  in libraries, “free exchange” shelves, private homes, rare book collections, piles about to be set on fire, etc., and given additional significance as “well thumbed” or “for show,” “worshipped as a purveyor of truth” or “reviled as a harbinger of death and destruction” and so on. Books are authored with intentions and read with intentions, and yet are dialogic, open to discrepant interpretations, and rife with unintentional effects (subconscious, unintended consequences, unknown conditions of possibility, etc.). The point is that a “book” is not a discrete social object but participates in larger sociohistorical contexts of its production, consumption, and meaning that are existentially constitutive of its emergence for both its content and form. 33 I will not be discussing the philosophical implications of feral children or “Robinson Crusoe”-​type self-​artificers (whatever they might be). However, it is worth noting that theories of agency which do not account for the constitutive powers of sociocultural forms in the formation of actual human agents enjoy preeminence in Western social science. Philosophical renderings of a universal mode of subjectivity tend to reduce subjectivity to a default algorithm of “rationality” in terms of how people make choices to gain “utility” or “advantage.” The logics of homo economicus, rational actor theory, and game theory are the most institutionalized and influential models of agency. DCR, on the contrary, seeks to discover actual agential power, rescuing agency from the two dominant poles of thought: from anti-​humanists, who dissolve agency as an effect of structure, and from individualists, who grant agents too much rationality, too much control, effectively denying the constitutive role of structure and culture in the formation of beliefs and desires. I will return to this issue in chapter five. 34 Compare the description of materialism presented in G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy (2018, 11): “For instance, when materialism leads men to complete fatalism (as it generally does), it is quite idle to pretend that it is in any sense a liberating force. It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. The determinists come to bind, not to loose. They may call their law the ‘chain’ of causation. It is the worst chain that ever fettered a human being.” Chesterton argues that the materialist frameworks laid out in scientific and Marxist worldviews do not accord human beings free will (agency), and hence promote fatalism, or worse, nihilism. In Chesterton’s view, only Christianity offers humankind an affirmative view of free will, based on the “sacred mystery” surrounding its freedom (ibid., 20). We might suppose, despite Chesterton’s silence on the precise nature of free will, that his view would find the seat of free will in the dualism of mind and body, in which the “mind” (as an immortal spirit or soul,

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76  Philosophical materialism and not subject to laws of nature) operates outside the “chain of causation” and thus free from the grip of determinations. The aspersions cast on “materialism” by Chesterton are not relevant to the philosophical materialist system advocated here. DCR accounts for the transformative power of agents as a potential for “free will” in fully secular and scientific terms.

Bibliography Archer, Margaret. 2003. Structure, Agency, and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhaskar, Roy. 1998. The Possibility of Naturalism:  A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. New York: Routledge. Bhaskar, Roy. 1999. “Materialism.” In A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Edited by Tom Bottomore. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Bhaskar, Roy. 2007. “Theorizing Ontology.” In Contributions to Social Ontology. Edited by Clive Lawson, John Latsis, and Nuno Martins. New York: Routledge. Bhaskar, Roy. 2008a. A Realist Theory of Science. New York: Verso. Bhaskar, Roy. 2008b. Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. New York: Verso. Bunge, Mario. 2004. “How Does It Work?” The Search for Explanatory Mechanisms.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 34: 182–​210. Chesterton, Gilbert K. 2018. Orthodoxy. Overland Park, KS: Digireads Publishing. Choi, Sungho, and Michael Fara. 2018. “Dispositions.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition). Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Accessed October 24, 2015. plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​fall2018/​entries/​dispositions/​. Elder-​Vass, Dave. 2007. “Re-​examining Bhaskar’s Three Ontological Domains:  The Lessons from Emergence.” In Contributions to Social Ontology. Edited by Clive Lawson, John Latsis, and Nuno Martins. New York: Routledge. Harré, Rom, and Edward H. Madden. 1975. Causal Powers:  A Theory of Natural Necessity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hartwig, Mervyn. 2007a. “Alethia.” In Dictionary of Critical Realism. Edited by Mervyn Hartwig. New York: Routledge. Hartwig, Mervyn. 2007b. “Determination, Determinism.” In Dictionary of Critical Realism. Edited by Mervyn Hartwig. New York: Routledge. Kistler, Max. 2002. “The Causal Criterion of Reality and the Necessity of Laws of Nature.” Metaphysica, 3 (1): 57–​86. Kistler, Max. 2007. “The Causal Efficacy of Macroscopic Dispositional Properties.” In Dispositions and Causal Powers. Edited by Max Kistler and Bruno Gnassounou. Aldershot: Ashgate. Körner, Stephan. 1975. “Mechanisms and Their Tendencies:  Review of A Realist Theory of Science.” Times Literary Supplement, April 11. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1959. “Political Sociology.” In Sociology Today:  Problems and Prospects. Edited by Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, and Leonard S. Cottrell Jr. New York: Basic Books. Makari, George. 2015. “Psychiatry’s Mind-​Brain Problem.” The New  York Times. Accessed November 14, 2015. www.nytimes.com/​2015/​11/​11/​opinion/​psychiatrys-​ mind-​brain-​problem.html. Marx, Karl. 1978. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” In The Marx-​ Engels Reader. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

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Philosophical materialism 77 Norrie, Alan. 2010. Dialectic and Difference:  Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice. New York: Routledge. Psillos, Stathis. 2007. “Causal Power.” In Dictionary of Critical Realism. Edited by Mervyn Hartwig. New York: Routledge. Sartenaer, Olivier. 2015a. “Synchronic vs Diachronic Emergence, A  Reappraisal.” European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 5(1). Accessed October 28, 2015. doi:10.1007/​s13194-​014-​0097-​2. Sartenaer, Olivier. 2015b. “Emergent Evolutionism, Determinism, and Unpredictability.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 51: 62–​68. Sayer, Andrew. 1998. “Abstraction:  A Realist Interpretation.” In Critical Realism: Essential Readings. Edited by Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson, and Alan Norrie. New York: Routledge. Wight, Colin. 2004. “Theorizing the Mechanisms of Conceptual and Semiotic Space.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 34(2): 283–​99.

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3  The ontology of consciousness

Introduction In the religious and philosophical tradition of Western thought there has existed a foundational belief and cultural logic of the “self ” as the essence and expression of individual being. In its formative religious guise, the self is the earthly manifestation of an eternal spirit. The explanatory power of the soul as the seat of the self supports personal autonomy, identity, and one’s “nature.” However, if God and soul are no longer backstops, the self—​ the “metaphysics of the subject” evaporated—​as phenomenal remainder of “consciousness” is laid bare and open to critique, inviting speculation over its ontology and capacities. Science and philosophy are left to consider the nature of conscious experience and whatever might be salvaged of a “self ” in terms of subject-​ agency “solely” in immanent and materialist terms.1 However, there is universal disagreement over the nature of consciousness as to the question of its reality. Knowledge claims about consciousness are frequently ensnared by religious legacies, philosophical error, and scientific blindness that tend to either mind-​body dualism or materialist reductionism. In this chapter, I  bring together the work of Searle, Husserl, and Sartre to formulate a theory of consciousness that transcends the dualist-​reductionist antinomy. I will argue that consciousness is real by the DCR causal powers criterion of reality. Foremost to the structure of consciousness is the emergence of a “self ” with synchronic and diachronic capacities of attention (what I term the capacity for “spatial and temporal roaming”) within the field of consciousness. Consciousness is also characterized by, and this is of highest significance, an aspect or “gap” of indeterminacy that is the consequence of the temporal sequencing of awareness, with the effect of “pulling” agency into existence. And this is the key point of this chapter: the possibility for and mechanism of human agency is grounded in the structure of consciousness as an intrinsic feature and capacity that emerges in virtue of the way in which human consciousness of sensory experiences and cognitive events (belief, desire, memory, anticipation, etc.) is always accompanied by a secondary conscious intentionality (or awareness) of the very fact of being conscious. Human awareness of being aware is the arch-​basis for the self; it is the fount of agency; it is subject that becomes subjectified in the course of a human life.

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The ontology of consciousness 79 The task of articulating an ontology of consciousness is twofold. First, the confounding dilemma between mind-​body dualism and reductive materialism must be overcome to develop a non-​dualist, ontologically real account of consciousness. In order for a phenomenology of consciousness to be epistemically justified, the “subject matter” must have ontological standing as real and display capacities of causality. In the model to be presented, consciousness is non-​reducible, causally efficacious, and relatively autonomous. Second, an account of autonomous human agency must find its causal mechanisms in the structure of consciousness. The necessary requirement is for basic, formal, and ontologically grounded capacities that become “subjected” via enculturation into sociolinguistic systems. These mechanisms provide the ontological foundation for basic capacities associated with agency in subjectivity, and ultimately provide the substructure for “reflexive deliberation” over “concerns, projects, and practices” (discussed in chapter four) and the subjectivization of subconscious material (discussed in chapter five), both of which in turn provide the basis for “transformative praxis,” the sine qua non of the causal effectivity of human being in the world. The account of consciousness I propose is constructed from the work of three philosophers who identify a core or central capacity in the structure of consciousness: John Searle’s concept of the “unified conscious field,” Edmond Husserl’s concept of “internal time consciousness,” and Jean-​Paul Sartre’s concept of “non-​positional consciousness.” There is a remarkable homology of operations these conscious capacities entail. While these concepts point to slightly different functions within the structure of consciousness, when brought together, their unique explanatory powers complete and expand one another. Ultimately, by focusing on the ontological claims made by Searle, Husserl, and Sartre at the level of consciousness, we can begin to account how subject-​agency is “vitalized” by the structure and capacities of consciousness. If subject-​agency is to be ontologized, this power will be accounted through the irreducible nature of consciousness, or in Searle’s words, a “first-​person ontology.”

Searle: who is the I in the first person? The ontological status of consciousness historically has tended toward substance dualism, classically formulated in philosophy as “Cartesian dualism,” in which mind (soul) and body (material) exist as distinct types of things in the world. The dualist position is understandable on one level. Consciousness seems qualitatively different from the brute given of materiality and the “laws of nature” shaping its expression. The conscious experience of perceiving, conjecturing, remembering, anticipating, and imagining—​ an “aboutness” of and in the world, consisting of thoughts and feelings—​seems radically separated from other things, people, and even our own bodies. While plants and other animals seem to live as automata, according to a preset life plan, human beings experience an uncomfortable level of awareness and openness

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80  The ontology of consciousness to what they can do, might do, and have to do. Mind-​material dualism captures the intuition that human consciousness is cut out on its own. In the historical development of the Western scientific paradigm of material monism, however, not only is the theology of the “soul” expunged from the record, but also the “mental” is rejected as having any separate reality; hence the move toward “eliminative materialism,” reducing the ethereality of consciousness to a set of propositions rendered solely in terms of its underlying biochemical strata. This type of reduction to a purported set of foundational causal operations is the hallmark of scientificity, such that, as Searle notes, “if consciousness can be reduced to brain processes then consciousness is nothing but a brain process” (2004, 76). In this account, consciousness is epiphenomenal of underlying chemical interactions and electrical currents coursing through the neuronal system, which always logically precede (in terms of causality) whatever people might “think” is going on. Cause and effect processes are objective, quantifiable, and subject to universal laws of determination. Consciousness as we know it does not fit in the paradigm. How, might we ask, can the conscious intentionality of a mere “thought” move inanimate “matter?” In answering this question, Searle gives several “conditions of adequacy.” The first is to reject any notion that reality consists of more than one “world”:  dualism, trialism, etc., however conceived. Searle argues that we must adhere to a singular view of reality, such that quarks, electrons, consciousness, and baseball games are part of one world, connected by virtue of basic facts of the universe presupposing higher-​order, “non-​basic facts” (2010, 4). Following from the first, the second condition of adequacy is that any account of consciousness must respect “basic facts…given by physics and chemistry, by evolutionary biology and the other natural sciences,” and in particular with respect to consciousness, “the atomic theory of matter and the evolutionary theory of biology” (ibid.). A third condition for Searle is that any account of consciousness cannot state facts violating our conscious, lived experience, viz., a theory cannot “say anything that is phenomenologically false” (2008, 135).2 The problem, however, as Searle notes, is that consciousness as the basis for intentional activity of saying, doing, and making is still largely a scientific mystery:  “nobody knows the answers to these questions:  how is consciousness caused by brain processes and how is it realized in the brain” (2010, 26). Moreover, brain science has yet to account for the deeper mystery, which evokes the “dualist intuition” of those moments when it appears what we “think” logically precedes (again, in terms of causality) the precise course of electrical and chemical processes in the brain (to consciously wink rather than just blink, etc.). The fact that science has yet to understand fully how consciousness arises in terms of its biochemical basis and how the “mind” moves the “body” does not preclude retroductive analysis (reasoning backwards from observation to an explanatory theory), and it certainly does not preclude a theory revolving around the emergence of causality at the macroscopic level

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The ontology of consciousness 81 defended by Kistler in chapter two (which has significant overlap with Searle’s theory, to be discussed below). What is more, in phenomenological terms, all subjects have a concrete experience of some entity (themselves) undertaking conscious thinking. The scientific and philosophical significance of this apparent fact requires an additional theory of the self. Searle argues: In order to have a scientific account of consciousness we will need more than an account of how the brain produces subjective states of sentience and awareness. We will need to know how the brain produces the peculiar organization of experiences that expresses the existence of the self. (2008, 50) Consciousness is not just the sum of all intentionalities, the complex “aboutness” of the world given by sensory data and cognitive and conative powers. Some “thing” owns up to, peers at, and lurks among these intentionalities, which Searle identifies as the “X” position of conscious awareness and activity that can react back upon the material body, such as the mundane activity of raising one’s arm, and with biofeedback, lowering one’s heart rate and mitigating affective states. It appears that within the structure of consciousness the capacity for conscious intentional activity must entail the existence of an “X” position, a “self ” with an ability to react back upon and alter the very biochemical, “more basic facts” from which it emerges.3 Searle’s proposed solution to the mind-​ body problem confronts the limitations of both the dualist and eliminative materialist positions. On the one hand, Searle outright rejects substance dualism because it fails in terms of the general worldview of science (the basic facts of reality), being that there is no non-​material “mental substance” in the universe to which we can ascribe causal powers to “move matter.”4 Consciousness cannot be the expression of a little ball or field of mental or “spiritual energy” that stands apart from the material world, unaccounted for by the known laws of physics (2004, 30). On the other hand, Searle rejects all varieties of “reductive” and “eliminative” materialist positions (but not materialism outright) because eliminative materialists take the fact that if conscious states “can be reduced to brain processes, then consciousness is nothing but a brain process” (ibid., 76). Reductionists rightly reject dualism because it is scientifically untenable; however, they do not reconceptualize consciousness in any terms other than its underlying biochemical processes. Consciousness, on the contrary, is not an illusion to be explained by reductionist, third-​person analysis. Searle’s critique of “eliminative materialism” (which he takes much more seriously as a philosophical position than dualism) rests on uncovering a confusion between the ontology of consciousness and the causality of consciousness (echoing Kistler’s distinction between a categorical base and a reduction base, discussed in chapter two). Searle notes that the debate between dualism and eliminative materialism

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82  The ontology of consciousness rests on a mistaken assumption. Both positions presume the mental and the physical would have to be mutually “exclusive ontological categories” (ibid., 76, italics mine). Eliminative materialists, however, cannot countenance “irreducible mental phenomena” that cannot be given an “objective” account (ibid., 88). Eliminative materialists, seeking to avoid the unconscionable position of dualism, eliminate the mental in the name of preserving all explanation of the physical world in objective materialist terms. The reduction eliminates consciousness by rendering what is “mental” a mere epiphenomenon of its materialist base such that “the mental qua mental does not exist, that there is nothing there but the physical” (ibid., 76).5 A  second and related assumption of eliminative materialism arises because eliminative materialists conceptualize causality in the classical Humean model whereby causality is a “relation of discrete events ordered in time” (ibid., 77). Once the “mind-​body problem” is conceived in terms of Humean causal relations, either the conscious mind or the biological brain (or both at different times) will have temporal priority over the other. For dualists, of course, this is not a dilemma: a mental “substance” is prior to and can affect a material substance. For eliminative materialists it is theoretically impossible: there are no mental substances, therefore no conscious experience could ever be a “discrete event” occurring before a biochemical event in the brain. Discrete events in the brain must always precede discrete events of consciousness (and this is why many reductionists see no possibility for free will in a fully determined universe of cause and effect). Searle’s critique of dualism and eliminative materialism sets the stage for his theory of consciousness and solution to the mind-​body problem, which he describes as “biological naturalism” (2010, 141). Consciousness, in Searle rather prosaic definition: Consists of those states of feelings, sentience, or awareness that typically begin when we wake from a dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until those feelings stop, until we go to sleep again, go into a coma, die, or otherwise become “unconscious.” (Ibid.) In addition, Searle proposes four theses of the “biological naturalism” of consciousness:



1. Conscious states, with their subjective, first-​person ontology, are real phenomena in the real world. We cannot do an eliminative reduction of consciousness, showing that it is just an illusion. Nor can we reduce consciousness to its neurobiological basis, because such a third-​person reduction would leave out the first-​person ontology of consciousness. 2. Conscious states are entirely caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain. Conscious states are thus causally reducible

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The ontology of consciousness 83





to neurobiological processes. They have absolutely no life of their own, independent of the neurobiology. Causally speaking, they are not something “over and above” neurobiological processes. 3. Conscious states are realized in the brain as features of the brain system, and thus exist at a level higher than that of neurons and synapses. Individual neurons are not conscious, but portions of the brain composed of neurons are conscious. 4. Because conscious states are real features of the real world, they function causally. My conscious thirst causes me to drink water for example. (2004, 79)

In the fight over the ontological status of consciousness, Searle’s theory retains the “dualist intuition” that consciousness is real and causally efficacious, while simultaneously correcting what he takes as the fundamental confusion over the relationship of ontology and causality that leads to eliminative materialism. Foremost, it is a mistake to assume that if consciousness is not a separate substance over and above its material brain base, consciousness is by default reducible in ontological terms to the brain, foreclosing its sui generis reality. Searle argues in thesis three: conscious states are “features of the brain system, and thus exist at a level higher than that of neurons and synapses. Individual neurons are not conscious, but portions of the brain system composed of neurons are conscious” (ibid.). The implication is that while conscious states are causally reducible to neurobiological processes (no brain neurobiology, no consciousness), they are not ontologically reducible. The capacity to causally react back upon or through the neuronal system gets lost by failing to recognize that its causal power is ontologically emergent. To begin to understand Searle’s argument for ontological irreducibility of consciousness to brain, he argues that philosophy of mind and theory of consciousness rest on crucial distinctions between entities in the world that are ontologically objective or subjective and knowledge claims (or experiences) which are epistemologically objective or subjective. The ontological distinction serves to delineate things in the world that objectively exist independent of the human mind (electrons, coral reefs, tectonic plates, etc.) and things that are dependent on human minds and intentionality for existence (aches and pains, poems, governments, money, etc.). The epistemological distinction delineates knowledge claims which are epistemologically public and verifiable (“it is not raining”) and claims which are subjective, private, and/​or an opinion (“I prefer vanilla ice cream over chocolate”). In combination, these distinctions form a three-​frame typology of human-​centered experiences. Entities such as the moon or a squirrel are “ontologically objective” and “epistemologically objective.” The moon exists independently of human intentionality (objective), and we can all agree (objectively), for the most part, the moon exists. In contrast, a child’s “imaginary friend” (and all acts of private imagination) is “ontologically subjective” and “epistemologically

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84  The ontology of consciousness subjective.” The friend’s existence depends on the child’s intentionality (subjective) and only they “see” and “hear” the friend talk (subjectively). The crucial combination is those entities that are ontologically subjective (money, pain, governments) and epistemologically objective. While pains and baseball games and conscious states are ontologically subjective, requiring a human mind for their existence, it is possible to give an objective account for their existence. In other words, “ontological subjectivity does not preclude epistemic objectivity” (2008, 29). The locus and cause of a headache can be explained in terms of the objective science of neurobiology. Dollar bills are a social construction (subjectively), which we all agree exists and holds the purchasing power of one dollar (objectively). The point Searle draws from this typology bearing on the nature of consciousness is that while consciousness in its manifest experience as such is not susceptible to third-​person analysis, it does not follow it is ontologically irreal. Many objective experiences, like hunger and pain, have an unproblematic subjective ontology, as they are discrete events with identified causal processes occurring in the brain. Consciousness, while more complicated and opaque in its nature, must follow the same logical structure pertaining to its reality and susceptibility to causal explanation. What is yet to be determined is how all sensory and cognitive functions “unify” into an experience of consciousness that is greater than the sum total of its interlocking intentionalities and grants the capacity to “move matter.” If consciousness is neither a substance nor ontologically reducible to the physical, the third option is to understand the nature of consciousness in analogy to the properties of liquidity and solidity. For both properties, the relationship of the underlying molecular structure to the physical property is one of “simultaneous causality” (which is identical to the DCR claim for synchronic-​constitutive emergence) (ibid., 86). The molecular structure of a liquid causes the property of liquidity—​not as a Humean “constant conjunction” of atomistic events, but as an intrinsic and occurring physical consequence of the underlying structure. Likewise, there is a relationship of simultaneous causality between the biological brain and consciousness. The unique quality of consciousness, in disanalogy to liquidity and solidity, is that because consciousness is only experienced subjectively, it is impossible to derive an independent, “third-​person,” ontological account of its nature. The motivation behind the materialist reduction of this problem stems from the belief that the only legitimate, scientific account of reality is empirical, verifiable, testable, etc. What is “real,” viz., ontologically objective, can only be posited when ascertained in terms that are epistemologically objective.6 The latter requirement for both ontological and epistemological objectivity Searle terms a “third-​person ontology,” and as we have seen above, this contrasts with entities such as pain that are ontologically subjective but verified as “real” when justified in epistemologically objective terms, and hence have a “first-​ person ontology.” Only the subject experiences their own conscious states, foreclosing any “third-​person ontology” that can be known and analyzed, like

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The ontology of consciousness 85 language, text, or a collection of butterflies. Consciousness is not a thing one can trip over or find under the couch cushions. Rather, like pain, consciousness has a “first-​person ontology” that only manifests as its “qualitative feel” in and of living creatures (2008, 142).7 Searle writes: When it comes to identifying features of the mind, such as consciousness and intentionality, with features of the brain, such as computational states or neurobiological states, it looks like there have to be two features, because the mental phenomena have a first-​person ontology, in the sense that they exist only insofar as they are experienced by some human or animal subject, some “I” that has the experience. And this makes them irreducible to any third-​person ontology, any mode of existence that is independent of any experiencing agent. (2004, 68) As noted above, the crux of the problem stems from failure to differentiate entities which are “ontologically subjective” and “ontologically objective.” The former are “observer-​relative” (depending for their existence on human minds:  aches, pains, baseball games, social institutions, etc.); the latter are “observer-​independent” (entities which do not require human minds for their existence: mountains, the moon, quarks, human bodies, etc.). The existence of most ontologically subjective entities, such as governments, money, and ice cream, is relatively easy to verify publicly and objectively. Insofar as it is possible to give an objective, third-​person account of the existence of intersubjectively experienced entities, it is a trivial point that “ontological subjectivity does not preclude epistemic objectivity” (2008, 29). The singular contentious case is the ontological status of conscious states and experiences. Third-​person accounts are available for the locus and cause of a headache when explained in terms of neuroscience, focusing on neuroanatomy and biochemistry as its ontology. Phenomenological, “first-​person” accounts of a headache are experiential and qualitative, and thus considered unscientific. Moreover, when conjoined by the eliminative materialist assumption of Humean causality as discrete events ordered in time, consciousness is rendered epiphenomenal.

The unified conscious field While consciousness cannot be known and analyzed objectively in terms apart from itself, a first-​person account of this unique first-​person ontological feature of the world focuses on the phenomenological experience of consciousness toward a “first-​person ontology,” manifesting as its “qualitative feel” in and of living creatures (ibid., 142). Searle’s formal account of consciousness seeks to demonstrate that it is real, irreducible, and operates causally through the neuronal system from which it emerges. Consciousness is the awareness of the neural system, primed for cognitive operations, and thus a higher-​order

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86  The ontology of consciousness or higher-​level description of the biochemical operations in action. Yet to be determined is (1)  how the effluence of neuronal synapses gives rise to consciousness as experienced, and (2) how our sensory and cognitive functions “unify” into an experience of consciousness, greater than the sum total of its interlocking intentionalities, manifesting an awareness of its own situatedness in the world. Granted consciousness is irreducible and real, it follows a “realist” phenomenology can identify the basic structure of consciousness and its capacities. For Searle, there are three key features of consciousness: it is qualitative, subjective, and unified, all of which interlock and subsequently ground the consciousness of personal subjectivity.8 Searle notes first that conscious states are qualitative in that our cognitive experiences are differentiated by “what’s on our mind,” as, for instance, the qualitative difference between listening to Led Zeppelin or contemplating a panoramic mountain view or planning a vacation. Qualitative experiences are formed out of the “intentionalities” of the mind, in that they are constituted by the “aboutness” of consciousness, whether they are features of the external world around us or features contemplated in self-​reflection.9 They include perceptions, memories, feelings, and beliefs. Nonetheless, Searle argues that “consciousness” and the intentional states that typically fill our conscious are not identical and should not be analytically conflated, for important reasons we will see. Second, consciousness is subjective, in that what is going on in our mind—​ our consciousness—​ cannot be experienced directly by any other person (“can’t you feel my pain?” “Sorry, not really…”). As a first-​person ontology, conscious states of animals are unique in the world in that they have a “subjective mode of existence” unlike all other entities having an “objective mode of existence.”10 To repeat, just because consciousness is ontologically subjective, this fact does not preclude an epistemologically objective account of its nature and structure, however difficult it may be in practice. Moreover, it is precisely the subjective experience, separate from other instances of consciousness around us, that ultimately is responsible for the psychic-​physical experience of having a self. The third feature of consciousness (and the most salient for my argument) is that conscious states (of music, the taste of food, etc.) manifest in a “unified conscious field.”11 Even though conscious awareness may be focused on one aspect (the distracting bus rumbling past; the discomfort of sitting too long in front of a laptop), all sensory experiences are parts of a singular and all-​inclusive totality, which generally coheres and provides a more or less seamless flow of conscious experience. Consciousness, however, is not just the sum total of intentionalities, agglutinated in a totality. Conscious experiences like perception do not create consciousness as a one-​ to-​ one correlation between a perceived object and its corresponding conscious state (in neurobiological theory, the “neuronal correlate of consciousness (NCC),” what Searle calls the “building block” approach, or like a “5D” experience of a very high number of pixels) (2008, 143). In this view, consciousness is nothing

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The ontology of consciousness 87 more than the sum total of sensory inputs with correlating neural reactions. Searle finds this approach wanting. He argues that conscious intentionalities modify a “preexisting conscious field” (2004, 108). The unified conscious field is a capacity or power of receptivity operating prior to all intentional states, always and actively primed to encounter perceptions, sensory inputs, etc. that are the “subject” of consciousness. The implication of the building block approach is that once a stimulus of consciousness is removed, consciousness “lapse[s]‌back into total unconsciousness,” such that a person’s consciousness at any one moment is only the totality of causal inputs (of colors, sounds, sensations, tastes, thoughts, etc.) “on the brain” (2008, 145). Once the “neuronal correlates” of consciousness (say, of an “experience of red” in the visual field, to take Searle’s example) are no longer triggered, consciousness has thus ended. The NCC approach to consciousness, with its strict cause and effect methodology, avoids any conception of consciousness as an emergent, preexisting awareness. As noted above, the motivation to avoid the possibility of emergent consciousness stems from the rejection of dualism and Humean causality. However, the NCC approach falters because it must also tangle with the fact that equally prevalent to conscious awareness (of intentionalities) is a simultaneous experience of a “self.” Searle argues there is a “requirement of the self as a formal feature of the unified conscious field” (ibid., 146). The self is first-​person ontological feature within the structure of consciousness. It is known through its phenomenological expression. The experience of a self provides the strongest evidence that consciousness is emergent and preexisting. Consequently, the profound philosophical implication of the unified conscious field is it includes an enduring “point of reference” (the self) and moreover, requires “motivations” to process cognitively the torrent of intentionalities gathered within the field.

The self emerges For one, Searle notes the key feature of the unified field is the capacity to “shift my attention at will” to different parts of the field (ibid., 146). Toward their conscious experience at any given time, the self-​subject, even without moving their head or eyes, can focus their attention on different sensations, thoughts, and perceptions. Subjects can consciously foreground and background sights, sounds, and feelings. Subjects can multitask: cook dinner, listen to music, and talk with friends simultaneously, moving their attention rapidly and effectively to the priority task moment-​by-​moment. The first-​person ontology of the unified conscious field thus grants humankind “a huge evolutionary advantage” to “coordinate a large amount of intentionality (“information”) simultaneously” (2004, 134). The question therefore, “crudely,” as Searle puts it, is: “when I say I can shift my attention at will, who does the shifting? Why should there be anything more to my conscious life than the existence of a conscious field?” (2008, 143, italics mine). Searle claims that “most philosophers” do not believe in a “self ” that has any kind of ontological reality over and

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88  The ontology of consciousness above the “sequence of our experiences, conscious and unconscious,” as they are situated in a “body in which these experiences occur” (ibid., 138). Searle argues that the strong hold of this Humean conception of the “self ” as a fictional cover given to bodies merely undergoing the sequencing of experiences is inadequate. It is precisely the capability to shift one’s attention to various features of the conscious field that suggests something “more” is in operation. This conscious power of selection and contemplation is further strengthened and expanded by additional abilities for subjects to close their eyes, turn their heads, or move to a new place, which thus open infinite possibilities of new, different, or reconfigured unified fields of intentionalities.12 The power to differentiate, separate, and focus within the unified field, as mode of efficient causation, is what is “more” for Searle, and what he takes to be the basic functional capacity as the “who” of the self, enduring in time and accumulating memories. Second, a “self ” who can range through and manipulate aspects of the unified field, moreover, must have motivations or reasons (however minimal) directing these changes in attention. For Searle: The causes of…action in the form of the reasons [for the action]…are not causally sufficient to determine the action. In normal non-​pathological cases, the action is motivated but not determined, because there is a gap between the perceived causes and the action. (Ibid., 147, italics Searle’s) Reasons in and of themselves do not directly entail subsequent actions upon which they are derived, that is to say, they do not have powers of agency to “push out” through the sentient subject. An ontological space (which I think is best understood as a temporal gap, and also plays a crucial role in Sartre’s existential phenomenology, to be discussed below) separates what behaviors ultimately manifest from a reason. Something—​ “the self ” through some effort, “the will”—​ultimately acts, pushing these deliberations and decisions into being.13 The gap ultimately vouchsafes the “freedom of will” to act on reasons, to do otherwise, to not do anything, or “even [make] the choice not to make free choices,” as the strict “determinist” would have it, and these are all predicated on some minimal openness and a “self ” choosing choices (ibid.). The mediating power operating in the “gap” between reasons and actions is, again, a formal capacity “X,” “something capable of initiating and carrying out actions” (ibid., 148). Thus, the structure of the unified conscious field brings together a given set of intentionalities, a self, and a process by which reasons for action become actualized through a distinct act of self-​willing. Searle’s theory of the self is thus a necessary structural component of the “unified conscious field,” and is the “X” locus around which its “continuing identity” in time is reflexively granted through acts of memory recall (ibid., 149). The self nonetheless never operates in isolation, detached from social context and unaware of its becoming in time. Searle notes that a significant

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The ontology of consciousness 89 “feature of the conscious field is that I do in fact have a sense of myself as a particular person situated at a particular time and place in history, with a certain set of particular experiences and memories” (ibid., 147). In total, therefore, the self as an agent “has to be the entity that perceives, remembers, imagines, and reflects” (ibid., 149). These intentional capacities enable subject-​ agents’ reasons for actions that a willing self instantiates in the world via their practice. This latter point is crucial, because it is only out of an ongoing life experience bounded by memories of the past and anticipations of the future that the subjectivity of the self—​formed by sociocultural dispositions, the obscurity of subconscious content, and the subject’s concerns and interests—​ gels into meaningful reasons for our actions.14

Husserl: mind the time In the preceding section, I  argued that consciousness is ontologically verified, thus legitimating the reality of the “unified conscious field.” Searle’s account is largely a synchronic account of consciousness over and above the various intentionalities that predominate in its field. The structure of consciousness in Searle’s theory necessarily includes capacities of roaming among intentionalities, surmising their contents, and exercising volition within the gap between reasons and actions. Searle’s structural account of consciousness, nonetheless, neither places emphasis on the temporal dimension of consciousness as an unfolding awareness, nor traces out how temporal awareness is possible. Husserl’s concept of “internal time consciousness” adds this temporal dimension and, when wedded to Searle’s unified field, adds a diachronic aspect, incorporating in much more detail how the structure of consciousness gives rise to the possibility for memories of the past and anticipations of the future. Crucially, this movement is inherently inviolable and indeterminate. Momentarily, it can be mesmerized by flashing lights, distracted by alluring images, and ordered to attention. A  sudden loud sound or bright light can “cause” our attention to focus, perhaps akin to a “fight or flight” response. But the “causal” power of such shock and awe events is always transitory, whereby a moment later subjects normally regain their awareness and ability to focus their attention within the conscious field at will. On this account, there is no direct external power that can cause subjects to focus on a particularity within the conscious field.15 In addition, Searle’s argument against substance/​property dualisms and reductionist/​ eliminative materialisms, and for an emergent, first-​ person ontology of the unified conscious field, are both logically and ontologically consistent with Husserl’s phenomenology of consciousness. In affinity with Searle, the enabling structure of the human experience of temporality is essential for a position of self-​awareness. It is what constitutes the organizing frame by which subject-​agents can monitor the comings and goings of the impressions, thoughts, and experiences that “come to mind.” Like Searle, what emerges in Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of the structure of internal

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90  The ontology of consciousness time consciousness is a formal “self ” as a capacity for conscious manipulation of temporal modalities of intentionality. In the act of disclosure of the world through the veritable “aboutness” of conscious experience, memories and anticipations, experiences and projects, are brought together in a process of “self ” definition.

Internal time consciousness Husserl’s conception of the conscious experience of temporality has three dimensions. The first, objective time, is substantiated by various technologies:  calendars, clocks, Stonehenge(?), and/​ or other cultural formats for organizing time.16 Objective time is typically demarcated in discrete units and time spans, such as hours, lunar cycles, millennia, and prominent cultural/​ religious events. Its modality is “public and verifiable,” which thus enables and coordinates the intersubjective experience of temporality for a collectively shared understanding of time (Sokolowski 2000, 130).17 The second dimension of time, subjective time, is constituted by the conscious flow of intentionalities and experiences as they arise sequentially and concurrently.18 Internal time is not public but private, and is not measured by objective time. Being “immanent” to subjectivity, it is confined to the qualitative experience of temporality as a basic sequential unfolding, and as a “pre-​ cultural” experience of time that is inherent to the structure of consciousness. Husserl argues that objective time is derivative of subjective time, in that “if we did not anticipate and remember, we could not organize the processes that occur in the world into temporal patterns” (ibid., 132). It is only when temporality is institutionalized, such as “Coordinated Universal Time” or the “Solar Hijri” calendar used in Iran and Afghanistan, that it becomes objectified and a non-​negotiable convention and profoundly doxic. Presupposing both objective and subjective time is a third dimension of temporality, what Husserl terms the consciousness of internal time. For Husserl, this dimension is one of the most salient capacities of human being, arising as an intrinsic feature of the structure of consciousness. It is, in a sense, a position of self-​awareness, a full step back from subjective time, able to monitor the comings and goings of the thoughts and experiences occurring in subjective time (and objective time as well). Moreover, the salient feature of consciousness of internal time is that “this level…does not require the introduction of yet another level beyond itself ” (ibid., 131). Sokolowski describes it as the “ultimate context” that “achieves a kind of closure and completeness…[and is] the origin of the deepest distinctions and identities, those that are presupposed by all the others that occur in our experience” (ibid.). Husserl’s account of internal time consciousness is thus irreducible and qualifies as an ontological claim for its emergence as a structural feature of consciousness, and subsequently, a legitimate “subject” for phenomenological analysis. Internal time consciousness, as a formal capacity, prefigures and enables the intelligibility of time and the existential consequences that flow

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The ontology of consciousness 91 from humans “being” in time.19 Foremost, “it constitutes the temporality of the activities that occur in our conscious life, such as the perceptions, imaginations, rememberings, and sensible experiences that we have” (ibid., 133). Husserl argues that internal time consciousness in its “living present” is “composed of three moments: primal impression, retention, and protention,” which interlock to form the basic temporal structure of consciousness (ibid., 136, italics Sokolowski’s). This structure accounts for the seamless flow of the events within subjective time, rather than a series of discrete and disconnected “screenshots” of subjective experience. Husserl’s view of temporality claims “we cannot define the momentary point [of the living present] as simply atomic, simply present without any involvement of the special kind of absence that is the rudimentary past and the rudimentary future” (ibid., 138). For Husserl, the “living present” revolves around an ongoing “primal impression” given by moment-​by-​moment experience of conscious intentionality. “Retention” is the legacy of ongoing primal impressions that have yet to form into full-​fledged memories (or most often, are forgotten in their banality), and despite being no longer primal (now “absent”), their contents are retained in the living present as a trace. The counterpart to retention is the experience of “protention,” a prescience of the future adjoining primal impressions, as a continual expectation of the next moment after which the primal impression will follow.20 The schema has a primal impression, book-​ended by retention and protention, both of which stretch beyond the primal impression in opposite directions, either as part of an enduring legacy of past moments or a forecast of forthcoming moments.

Time for the self Husserl’s more radical claim is that the capabilities both for memory (to recognize a memory as a past experience, as having occurred in a prior time) and for anticipation (to recognize and organize future possibilities, actions, and/​or plans as occurring in a specified future subjects hope to experience or avoid) are enabled precisely by “the rudimentary past” of retention and “the rudimentary future” of protention (ibid.). Husserl’s formal explication of the temporal structure of consciousness as a “living present” (incorporating rudimentary experiences of past, present, and future) bestows the fundamental temporal meaning on intentional contents of consciousness, or, in other words, gives intentional contents their basic significance as having a past, present, or future temporal orientation. Husserl’s account of internal time consciousness as the basis for the human capacity for remembering and anticipating is an essential condition of possibility for the recursive power of reflexive deliberation: to think back upon the self and adjust for the next moment of being. Nonetheless, there is no implication of “epistemic authority” over subjective experiences of past, present, and future. Memories are inflected and skewed by present concerns (if not false or self-​serving); interpretations born from primal perceptions of the

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92  The ontology of consciousness world (what Husserl calls “categorical intentionality,” in dialectical relation to “object intelligibility”) are often ideological and socioculturally dispositional; and our desires for the future are conditioned by subconscious contents via, for example, Lacanian mechanisms of enculturation such as the big Other and objet petit a, which I will discuss in chapter five. What remains, however, is the living present as “the origin of our own self-​identity as conscious agents of both truth and action” (ibid., 142). Its status is “pre-​personal,” functioning autonomously, and resistant to conscious effort to alter its structure and temporal ordering: to slow down, accelerate, or halt its march. The constitutive effect of the living present gives the subject-​agent a past of memories, a future of anticipations, and a primal impression providing the raw material for categorical intellection and understanding. Moreover, it is precisely “when we identify and know worldly things, and when we experience our own sensations, perceptions, memories, and intellectual activities, we are always also unreflectively bringing ourselves to light as the identifiable source and receiver of such achievements” (ibid., 144). What emerges in Husserl’s phenomenological analysis is a formal “self ” as a capacity for conscious manipulation of primary modalities of intentionality (precisely, mutatis mutandis, as Searle finds, a postulation of an “X” position). In the act of disclosure of the world through the veritable “aboutness” of conscious experience, the subject’s impressions, memories, and anticipations are brought together. Subject-​agents form their own narratives of these phenomena (or let others impose their views). Despite all the deformations, misrepresentations, and obfuscations, ultimately, as Sokolowski defines it, “phenomenology is reason’s self-​discovery in the presence of intelligible objects” (ibid., 4, italics Sokolowski’s). Be that as it may, it follows, most crucially, that subjects categorize and define this “self ” through their reflexivity. Toward the self, subjects ascribe qualities and impose culturally inscribed meanings and categories in an act of self-​constitution with profound implications. In the following section on Sartre, this problematic is front and center in his crusade against mauvaise foi (self-deception), engendered out of the subject’s confrontation with its temporality: the inevitable and relentless absence of being the protention of time portends.

Sartre: freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose In the two preceding sections, I  have examined Searle’s and Husserl’s accounts of the formal structure of consciousness and capacities for conscious awareness. Each account gives a portion of the capacities intrinsic to the “self ” in terms of the subject’s conscious awareness. This “self ” so far lacks any original meaning or purpose other than an empty set of “reasons” presupposing conscious alterations of attention in the subject’s spatial and temporal orientation. I  propose to develop further this capacity in light of Sartre’s existential-​ phenomenological discernment of non-​positional consciousness, which is the continuous self-​awareness that revolves around the

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The ontology of consciousness 93 experience of time. Sartrean philosophy is in essential ways a reworking and expansion of Husserl’s “internal time consciousness.”21 To Sartre, the self (or ego/​cogito) is not a given existent “in operation” or somehow existing prior to its own consciousness, but is an effect emerging out of the temporal structure of consciousness. Of the many implications Sartre draws from his concept of non-​positional consciousness, I  will focus on an existential and processual logic, rendering an inherent dialectic between desire and self-​completion within the subject-​agent that is inherent to consciousness. The limitation of Searle’s and Husserl’s concepts is an unconcern with or a failure to recognize that the capacity for a hyper-​awareness (an awareness of the intentional aboutness of consciousness) is also the source for the genetic “impulse” of human being in the world. Non-​positional consciousness is an indispensable component of a first-​person ontology and a necessary capacity required for reflexive monitoring of conscious experience. It is a chief condition of possibility for human agency, and presumably other sentient creatures, to have intelligible intentional states that cohere around some minimal sense of the self, and a subject who owns to a set of memories, perceptions, anticipations, beliefs, desires, reasons, and projects in the world. The key feature of consciousness for Sartre, and where he advances beyond Searle and Husserl, is Sartre’s recognition that it is the existence of an always-​present “gap” between the self and the various intentional modalities, especially of the self in relation to time, that gives the subject an awareness of their own ontological conditions. On the one hand, the gap vouchsafes the self (in principle) from “biological,” subconscious, and social determinations that would be ineluctably followed without the possibility of resisting or transcending. On the other, “inverse” hand, the subject is confronted with two existential problematics: nothingness and freedom. This fundamental “absence” demands from subjects a response: the subject must at some level “choose” their next moment, which has the consequence of pulling desire into being. This “choice” is equivalent to a desire born from both the nothingness of an undetermined future and the freedom created by an undetermined past. Out of the temporal structure of consciousness thus emerges an always unceasing, unfinished, and incomplete self. Consciousness of temporality creates simultaneously an incomplete self interlocked with desire, which thus prefigures Sartre’s famous existential concepts of “being-​for-​itself ” and “mauvaise foi” as they relate to the ontological openness of concrete existence.22 The confounding existential dilemma is that such “openness” is simultaneously the condition of an “absence” that presents to the subject an ineluctable problem. “Self-​deception” becomes the default stance of the self towards its self-​ definition of its own being in the world. To identify the self with intentional contents—​desires, drives, motivations, beliefs, or social roles—​is to reify what are only contingencies of being as essential a priori qualities of being. Subjects misconstrue states of conscious being for their essence in a vainglorious attempt to find the “true self.”

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94  The ontology of consciousness

The Sartrean structure of consciousness In his analysis, Sartre emphasizes two dichotomous and interlocking modalities within the structure of consciousness. The first is the difference between reflective consciousness and non-​reflective consciousness.23 In non-​reflective consciousness, the objects of intentionality are given full attention, with no thought to the “self ” in relation to or among the objects. With a converse logic, reflective consciousness brings the “self ” reflexively into conscious focus as an object of contemplation. Sartre gives the example of a man running to catch a bus. While running, his full attention is given to the action (avoiding other pedestrians, not tripping, cutting the best angle to the door, and so forth), and thus is being non-​reflective because his attention is primarily focused on the “objective” world. However, as soon as he realizes his attempt will fail, and his “self ” is brought into consideration as an intentional object (“drat, I’ve missed the bus! Should I get a taxi or walk now?”), he has switched to a reflective form of consciousness, which now revolves around his “subjective” experience. The second modality is the distinction between positional consciousness and non-​positional consciousness. The concept of positional consciousness captures the basic phenomenological insight that all consciousness is intentional, that consciousness always has an “aboutness” as its primary property. Consequently, all consciousness is always positional: it “posits” objects before a subject, whether perceptions, thoughts, or imaginations, etc. Thus, positional consciousness always includes either the modalities of non-​reflective consciousness or reflective consciousness. As we saw above with Searle, however, consciousness is not just a sequence of experiences. The crucial aspect of consciousness for Sartre is the simultaneous capacity for “self-​awareness” of our positional consciousness, what he terms non-​positional consciousness. Sartre writes: “every conscious existence exists as consciousness of existing”—​insofar as the subject always has a point of view toward all instances of positional consciousness (1956, liv). There is ever present in conscious life an awareness of the “consciousing” occurring in real time. When a subject watches a film, their attention is transfixed by the visual field and soundtrack. No matter how engrossed in the film they become, they never enter into the film experience and “get lost” entirely. There is a concurrent awareness that there is an existent “self ” emplaced in the context of a film-​showing who is watching, listening, and deriving meaning from the narrative. It is an extraordinary feature of human consciousness to have a parallel conscious process aware of its existence per se, running next to its positional consciousness of the world of reflective and non-​reflective consciousness in terms of knowledge per se.

The self is not what it is and is what it is not The subject has a body and is situated in space, and whether on a “walkabout” in Australia or in prison on Alcatraz, every past moment will condition

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The ontology of consciousness 95 the present moment for that body by setting the stage and its emplacement. Likewise, if a subject is in a non-​or reflective mode consciousness, tracking, rehearsing, or thinking through a thought (running to the bus, being late, feeling frustrated, etc.), the mode will have a constitutive effect on the present (as a primal impression of what is seen, felt, thought, etc.) until the self changes its attention to something else by inclination or changing conditions (e.g., your present thought interrupted by remembering you forgot to turn off the stove; a loud noise draws your attention). For non-​and reflective consciousness, the present immediately becomes a past which largely conditions the next moment as the new present, ad infinitum during the course of a day. On the contrary, the arch-​awareness that non-​positional consciousness has of positional consciousness (of one’s own body, thoughts, external conditions, other people around, etc.) is always at a second remove from the conditions and pathways “subjecting” both the body and positional consciousness. Like Searle, like Husserl, Sartre discovers the basis for the “self ” in the structure of consciousness. The “internal time awareness” of non-​ positional consciousness enables the capacity to distinguish between primary impressions and acts of remembrance and anticipation (and, secondary to my point here, of imagination). The essential structural feature for Sartre is that non-​positional consciousness never collapses into positional consciousness. The subject’s ability to roam among present, past, and future modes of positional consciousness (like multitasking) necessitates a corresponding point of reference (“X” position of conscious experience, “doing the doing”) that is subjectified as the self. While positional consciousness is ultimately a state of knowledge of intentionalities, the intrinsic gap between positional and non-​positional consciousness has the effect of giving the subject the possibility of awareness of their own ontological conditions and the being whom these conditions confront. To Sartre, the ontological awareness to which non-​positional consciousness presents human being induces a primary and inescapable existential dilemma. Human consciousness is differentiated from all other entities in the world by its stance of being-​for-​itself. Most things in the world are complete in their being: rocks, chairs, palm trees, wolves, etc. exist in and of themselves, manifesting what Sartre terms “being-​in-​itself.” Most things in the world do what they do in accordance with what they are, and this definition or “mode of being” or “essence” is (in the case of rock literally) set in stone. By their definition, the form of their existence is predetermined and their life pathway laid out. It appears, however, that humankind is unique. A  high degree of what a human being is is not preordained by a totalizing “species being.” Moreover, it is banal to claim culture or polity are definitive of humankind because of the wide range of cultural and historical differences that come to express a common humanity.24 The point is even stronger when accounting for individual idiosyncrasies within any social milieu.25 Consequently, human beings are not predetermined. Human beings share a biological affinity with other mammals, but at the level of the individual, the “evolution” of each

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96  The ontology of consciousness person is (again, in principle) relatively wide open. The mechanism that engenders human freedom, in Sartre’s view, is located in the structure of human consciousness. The unfolding of consciousness in time encounters a formal condition of “nothingness,” an absence that emerges from the subject’s relationship to the past and future. As such, each instance of “human being in the world” of non-​positional consciousness is precisely a “consciousness of being.” But such consciousness is not identical with its being in the world. The gap produced in the dislocation of non-​positional consciousness of the subject’s positional consciousness of non-​reflective and especially of reflective consciousness (an awareness of the fact the subject is aware of themselves in the world) produces a gap (as a moment, distance, absence, and/​or nothingness) between the self and the world, simultaneously to all positional consciousness of the self and the world. As such, human being is “for-​itself ”—​the existential problematic par excellence. A consequence of the gap that constitutes the subject as “being-​for-​itself ” is that there are no prior determinations by “universal” modes of human being, whether some form of “human nature,” “soul,” or “the sociocultural.” Because there is always a distinction or gap between consciousness and the objects of consciousness, consciousness never collapses fully into the object (the goal of mysticism, such as union with God, nature, or spirit animals), nor does the object collapse into consciousness (the outcome of theories of structural determinism, whether by language, discourse, symbol, or social-​structural dispositions which inhabit and operate through the subject). Whatever beliefs or desires come to the fore, they do not manifest automatically without some minimal decision (by approval, acceptance, ignorance, apathy, etc.), and thus they neither prevent nor compel subjects to think or behave in a certain way.26 Whatever has happened in the preceding moment cannot overdetermine the next moment; whatever is about to happen cannot retroactively determine what is going to happen; and for general cognition, whatever crosses the mind cannot determine what subjects do or might “mind.” If existence is ontologically “open,” the concrete lived reality of human being is created ex post facto, and is therefore contingent on the singular experience and reasons for choices of the subject-​agent. Sartre, with his usual disposition to be obtuse, describes the stance of consciousness—​its being-​for-​itself—​as that which is not what it is and is what it is not. This is the core dynamic of consciousness in Sartre’s phenomenological existentialism.27 When subjects attempt to define themselves in the mode of the “in-​itself,” they tend to posit beliefs and desires as the ontology of the self—​as what they “really” are in nature. In virtue of mauvaise foi, subjects deceive themselves, as in Sartre’s example of a cafe waiter playing the part to gaudy perfection, which belies his overidentification with an ideal “waiter.” The basic logic of self-​deception stems from non-​positional conscious awareness and the unassailable gap between the desire to be a being-​in-​itself (secure, solid, self-​identical, fulfilled, etc.) and the experience of being-​for-​itself (open, contingent, and

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The ontology of consciousness 97 incomplete). The desire to be a being-​in-​itself and identify one’s nature, for all time and from the beginning, is what Sartre describes as the “God project”—​to be self-​causing yet fully self-​actualized. The impossibility of being “God,” being-​for-​and-​in-​itself, generates existential anxiety, because the subject remains aware non-​positionally that they are not grounded in their “nature” but rather a product of prior choices and projects, and hence ultimately responsible for what they are. Subjects fail to recognize that their own manifestation of being is not identical with their beliefs and desires (as social categories:  “native Texan,” “war veteran,” “jilted husband,” “Christian evangelist,” etc.; and as characterological dispositions: “macho stud,” “victim,” “coward,” etc.). If non-​positional consciousness is the mechanism in the structure of consciousness that conditions the possibility for human freedom, it is because consciousness as a state of being-​for-​itself is permeated by “nothingness” or indeterminacy. The choices subjects make in the past (even moments ago) do not determine the present any less than the future. At every moment, subjects are neither what they were nor what they will become (consciousness is not what it is). Out of nothingness, subject-​agents remain forced to make choices, including the choice to not-​be, whether a worldly quietus or an earthly suicide. The nothingness of conscious being, however, is also coterminous with the condition of possibility of freedom for the subject (consciousness is what it is not). The facticity of the past is thus mediated by one’s present choice of being, the subject-​agent either reifying being in the attempt to be in-​itself or transcending it by authentic engagement with freedom. And here I want to stress that the temporality of consciousness places the burden of finding succor in being-​in-​itself as a project to be realized at some future point. The “self of the moment” is thus contrasted with an anticipated, idealized, “future self.”28 The difference between the present and future constitutes an absence (incompleteness), which can only be overcome through its elimination. This in turn prefigures one of the essential points in Sartre’s theory of consciousness: the structure of consciousness intrinsically generates desire out of its absent center. Sartre formulates an ontological desire predicated on a lack of ontological completeness. Nonetheless, the teleological thrust of the projects desire engenders remains eternally deferred, despite attempts at the mauvaise foi deception of self-​objectification. And yet, this desire can never be quenched (nor would we want it to be) as the ideal, fully realized self always recedes from grasp. Desire always engenders new objects for its attainment.29 Non-​positional consciousness acts as a structuring principle within conscious experience of humankind. It creates the subject’s awareness of facticity and thrown-​ness into a world not of one’s choosing, and yet locks in responsibility for how subjects relate to their facticity and for its transcendence. Sartre writes: It means that making sustains being; consciousness has to be its own being, it is never sustained by being; it sustains being in the heart of

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98  The ontology of consciousness subjectivity, which means once again that it is inhabited by being but that it is not being: consciousness is not what it is. (1956, 62) Sartre’s point, when wedded to the Husserlian breakthrough that consciousness always pertains to the “aboutness” of intentionalities passing through itself, highlights the point that the structure of consciousness and its emergent capacities for synchronic and diachronic awareness has had the inevitable consequence of granting an ontological space of freedom out of which human agency is born, forced to intend itself. In Sartre’s view, the dynamic of the “nothingness” generating desire has another consequence, one that is mistaken and directly confronts the DCR argument for determinant absences as real and causally efficacious states of all forms of being. To Sartre, the existential condition of the nothingness emerging from the structure of consciousness creates the possibility for all “absences” which subjects perceive and experience in the world. Desire thus prefigures a world shot full of holes. And while negativities are born from the structure of consciousness, they are discovered as objective facts about the world. Some desires subjects can fill, other desires are stymied by others, repressed by law, found unreasonable, or otherwise unattainable. Lack of clean water, housing, jobs, friendship—​any perceived “hole,” negation, privation, lack, deficiency, etc. is determined by human being-​for-​itself. However, Sartre contrasts the indeterminacy and nothingness of consciousness with all instances of being-​in-​itself as the backdrop of the human existential drama, attempting to find an essence or “strong ontology” of the self through strategies of self-​deception. Things that express being-​in-​itself are purportedly self-​contained, positive, and complete in their present state (whether in a process of genetic composition of form like a growing tree, or entropic decomposition like fallen leaves), and it is impossible per Sartre’s definition that their state in the world could contain an objective absence. Only conscious awareness can constitute negativities, or, as Sartre argues, “the being by which Nothingness comes to the world must be its own Nothingness” (1956, 23). Consequently, it is desire as it reaches out into the world that imposes absences. The only incompleteness is within the human being. As argued in chapter two, however, in DCR depth ontology, absence is real in virtue of the causal criterion and the crucial category by which every becoming is a be-​going, and processes of change are tightly bound to mechanisms that absent present states for emergent states of being. Absences are objective, intransitive features of the world, and the Western philosophical tradition has worked itself into tangle avoiding the power of negation. Sartre’s theory of being-​in-​itself falls into the trap of ontological monovalence. His reification of being-​in-​itself as pure positivity continues a long line of “absent absences” in ontological speculation. Be that as it may, I do not think Sartre’s reification of being-​in-​itself undermines his existential phenomenology. Sartre’s concept of being-​for-​itself is compatible with

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The ontology of consciousness 99 DCR ontology and its implications for consciousness, agency, and subjectivity. For the subject, the “genetic impulse” of desire revolves around the negation of privation, and frequently the negation of negation itself. Thus, in a slightly different reading, self-​deception (the pursuit of human being-​ in-​itself in the face of nothingness) is a consequence of the legacy of ontological monovalence, taken on as a “spiritual” or psychodynamic project of the self. Cutting through this mystification is the first task to promote human freedom and flourishing.

Conclusion The central problem this chapter has sought to address is that accounts of subjectivity, whether in philosophy or social theory, studiously avoid explicit accounts of consciousness. Philosophy of mind and phenomenology confront the nature of consciousness as per the definition of their fields. But many disciplinary accounts of consciousness are either wrong, born of conceptual confusion (as Searle argues for mainstream reductionist accounts of cognition in philosophy of mind), or they are out of fashion and ignored because of the widespread damage post/​structuralist accounts of subjectivity have inflicted on the humanities and social sciences, rendering consciousness as derivative of socially constructed subjectivities (and hence phenomenologically vacuous because of an incessant anti-​ontological focus on epistemology). A  realist ontology of consciousness and a phenomenological account of its features are the only clear path to delineating a true philosophical anthropology. To this end, by providing a robust ontology of consciousness, offering flank protection against material reductionist accounts, consciousness is real and causally efficacious. Second, the phenomenological-​existential approaches to consciousness provided by Husserl and Sartre highlight implications of temporality, which is the key formal capacity of consciousness that can, in principle, ground the possibility for human agency in its reflexive deliberation and the profound way temporality prefigures existential problematics afflicting all subjects, namely self-​deception and desire. With an ontology of consciousness in hand, a theory of subjectivity so conjoined and attuned to the sociocultural and geohistorical structuration of subjectivity should neither subsume agency in a social-​structural ontology nor privilege a “frictionless” or “rugged” individualism of radical autonomy, epistemic certitude, and self-​transparency. The account of consciousness presented is an initial gesture in this project, providing an ontologically grounded account of the powers and capacities of human agency.

Notes 1 The compound concept of “subject-​agent” I  employ throughout this chapter (and book) emphasizes the ontological difference between human subjectivity and the formal and innate capacity for human agency in terms of autonomous causal

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100  The ontology of consciousness power. I take subjectivity to be the outlook and identity of actually existing people (in terms of their beliefs, desires, perspectives in the world, etc.), who are socialized in particular geohistorical locales. 2 Searle has noted that perhaps no other field of study displays greater divergence between the respected, consensus views within philosophy of mind and neuroscience and the brute, banal experience of our conscious waking life. The point here is that eliminative materialists cannot deny we experience consciousness (however “epiphenomenal” or a “mystified conceit”). And yet, to expunge from philosophical consideration this experience merely because it does not “fit the model” ought to raise questions over what assumptions drive such irrealism—​assumptions we will see are undermined. 3 It is worth noting the work of Catherine Malabou (2012) on the philosophical and psychoanalytical implications of neuroplasticity and related research developments examining how repeated behavior and brain damage alters the neuronal structure and hence subjectivity in terms of entrenched neural pathways. In addition, recent and potentially revolutionary developments in the scientific study of consciousness appear to support the main thrust of Searle’s argument (Hamilton 2011; see also Physics arXiv Blog 2014). 4 As discussed in chapter two, substance dualism should be contrasted with the position of “property dualism,” the latter being the tendency of contemporary dualists who do not wish to violate laws of physics. Searle argues that this less ambitious argument—​for consciousness as not a unique “substance” but as a “property” of the brain—​ultimately faces the exact same problem substance dualists face, namely explaining how a mental property can interact causally with the brain. Nonetheless, despite these cloistered debates over the merits of dualism, widespread belief in the “soul” among the religious maintains “dualism” as powerful symbolic formation and cultural legacy. For his critique of dualism as a philosophical position, see Searle (2004, 29–​33). 5 Spoiler alert:  this is precisely Searle’s position, “that the mental qua mental is physical qua physical,” to be explained below (2008, 76). 6 Searle’s point here is in line with the DCR critique of the “epistemic fallacy” prevalent in empiricism, positivism, and postmodernism, in which questions of being (ontology) are regulated and delimited by epistemological frameworks, in this case the requirement for “third-​person accounts” of reality, thus preselecting what can and cannot be objects of knowledge and hence “real.” 7 Let us ignore the debates over the extent snails and so forth have some form of consciousness. 8 In Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004: 93–​101), Searle lists 11 separate features of consciousness. For brevity’s sake, I am focusing on three because the remaining features, like the “mood” that accompanies all conscious states and the fuzzy distinction between “active and passive consciousness,” while important, are not central to the larger points I am gleaning from Searle’s philosophy of mind. 9 Let me note here, in anticipation of my analysis below, Sartre’s distinction between “positional consciousness” and “non-​positional consciousness,” and the functional similarity with Searle’s distinction between “intentionalities” and the “unified conscious field.” 10 As subjective and seemingly disconnected from all other instances of consciousness, the enduring problem of skepticism over “other minds” is raised. Searle is not impressed with this problem (cf. 2004 12–​14), as he sees it as a “special case”

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The ontology of consciousness 101 of the more general problem of “skepticism about the external world.” The latter problem concerns the epistemic relationship between the mind and world: how do we justify that things in the external world exist and that we know them as they are? To answer the skeptic, Searle makes a “transcendental argument for direct realism” (or what he also calls a position of “naive realism”) based on the supposition that “a public language presupposes a public world,” with the implication that intersubjectivity via language enjoins “the privacy of sense data” to mutual recognitions and shared epistemic certainties (e.g., “don’t eat the yellow snow”; “zombies do not exist”; “it’s Miller time!”) (ibid., 189–​91). 11 Searle notes that his conception is more or less identical with Kant’s notion of “the transcendental unity of apperception” (2008, 142). Searle, however, does not evoke a Kantian transcendental ego imposing “our sense of the phenomenal” on noumena via a grid of temporal, spatial, and causal intelligibility. 12 By “reconfigured,” I  mean to suggest that we have the ability to reinterpret the unified conscious field, most saliently by the inclusion of memories and anticipations. For instance, I  can single out a large tree in a park for contemplation in the unified field, but I can also remember climbing the tree as a child, transforming the meaning of the tree. I can also anticipate a possible future of the tree (through imagination or future-​orientating the tree) with the additional conscious content of bringing my yet unborn child to the park to also climb. I will discuss below Searle’s notion of the “unified conscious field” in relation to a variety of “intentional modalities,” in light of Husserlian phenomenological insights into the temporality of consciousness. 13 For many routine actions the self and will are bound tightly together in a seamless flow. In these cases, our reasons for behaviors are long established and well rehearsed, being perfunctory and mindless. “Getting up in the morning,” “making another cup of tea,” and “getting ready for bed at night,” all the small daily rituals of life require little deliberation beyond the usual aggravations: “I wish he would put the toilet seat down!” Thus, in routine, if we are “selfing,” we are “willing” without notice of the gap, for instance, when changing our focus within the unified conscious field. But at any moment during a routine action, if somebody asks, “why are you doing that?” an agent can give at least a semblance of rationality (however mistaken or ideological) for the action:  “as required by my religious beliefs, I light a candle every morning to venerate my husband’s ancestor spirits…” What is more interesting are those moments when we do not act, when we desire to do or say something, but remain still or silent. Or conversely, we choose to act, despite a desire out of reasons not to do or say something, in accordance with peer pressure or social mores, for example. The ability to override a reason for an action by a countervailing reason for non-​action or an other-​action (because of cost-​benefit, fear of censure, decorum, laziness, tactical advantage, and so forth) shows that we can deliberate over several competing reasons for different courses of action and choose among them. 14 The force of reasons to effect actions are thus necessary but not sufficient to account for their realization. This logic enhances the significance of a “reason” for an action because reasons can be delusional, mistaken, rationalized, or under “false consciousness.” Consequently, given the multitude of “motivations,” the gap between reason and action remains in effect, always requiring a (fallible) “self ” to choose to act. In addition, if reasons are the basis determining why the subject-​agent changes its attention within the unified field, they do so because they

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102  The ontology of consciousness are motivated by some value, desire, belief, intention, project, etc. Though I do not address this issue in my discussion of Sartre below, his concept of the “original project” as the foundational raison d’être of the subject is a useful beginning to understanding our motivations, and, as Sartre notes, could be the basis for existential psychoanalytical theory and therapy (cf. Sartre 1956 on “existential psychoanalysis”) These insights only strengthen the ethical task of both psychotherapy and critical social theory to transform our knowledge of what we do and why. 15 In Anthony Burgess’, A Clockwork Orange, Alex undergoes the “Ludovico Technique,” whereby the arch hooligan’s eyes are pried open to watch graphically violent movies and injected with drugs, conditioning him to become nauseous when thoughts of violence or sexual impulses come to mind. Notably, the prison chaplain declares this form of state power immoral, as the technique undercuts Alex’s free will. 16 Objective time is also termed interchangeably with “world time” and “transcendental time.” I will use only the term “objective time,” to avoid confusion and to connote a relation to Searle’s notion of “epistemologically objective knowledge,” i.e. that while objective time is “ontologically subjective,” it is public and verifiable, and thus a collective intention and epistemologically objective. 17 To note, my understanding of Husserl has been greatly influenced by Robert Sokolowski’s (2000) realist account of Husserlian phenomenology. 18 Subjective time is also termed interchangeably with “internal time” or “immanent time.” Subjective time, similar to my reasoning in endnote 13 above, meshes well with Searle’s concept of “epistemologically subjective knowledge,” i.e. that while subjective time is “ontologically objective,” like feelings of pain or hunger, it is a private and solely intrasubjective experience, and thus epistemologically subjective. 19 I have in mind here various existential facets of being:  death, freedom, willing, responsibility, personal identity, our place in history and culture, and relationship with the Other. 20 The mode of awareness given by protention is manipulated in horror movies. In the usual clichéd scene of a young woman walking alone in the dark, we (the audience) expect something very bad to happen, but we do not know when. We anticipate some sort of attack, and can speculate about or imagine various scenarios of the evil deed. Nonetheless, it is the effect of protention that gives rise to the ability to anticipate the future, because we know something is always about to happen. In the humdrum of daily life, we expect more of the same is coming (sometimes with horror!). In the hysteria of a horror film, we expect a radical breakout of mayhem and violence is coming (always with glee!). 21 My reading of Sartre is indebted to Paul Vincent Spade (1996), whose extensive outline and explication of Being and Nothingness clarified for me many points of Sartre’s thought. 22 In the English translation of Being and Nothingness (1956), Hazel E.  Barnes translates “mauvaise foi” as “bad faith.” In his collection of existentialism’s “greatest hits,” Walter Kaufman (2004, 280) proposes an alternative translation, “self-​deception,” as a closer description in English of what the term in French connotes. I will follow Kaufman’s example. 23 In the phenomenological literature, “non-​reflective consciousness” is interchangeable with “pre-​reflective consciousness.” I will employ the former term to retain

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The ontology of consciousness 103 a nice homology with the second set:  positional-​and non-​positional modes of consciousness. 24 To point out human beings are “cultural animals” or “political animals” does not explain anything. It does not explain why specific patriarchal and matriarchal societies exist, nor why, in late modernity, liberal democracies apparently are under threat from authoritarianism. 25 Why is one person promiscuous and another not? To note, Sartrean existentialism does not adequately address the profound ways social and cultural conditions are intrinsic to human being. This issue is the “subject” of chapter four. 26 This critical insight of Sartrean existentialism, which I think is accurate in principle, must be modified. While this essay is concerned with the ontology of consciousness, it is a first step toward an ontology of subjectivity attuned to the process by which subject-​agents intersect with the social field for antecedent conditions of subjectivity in terms of enablements and constraints. 27 I see Sartre as a useful bridge between the more formal explication of the structure of consciousness per Searle and Husserl and the beginning of an explication of the structure of subjectivity. The structure of consciousness for Sartre anticipates the subject as embedded in a social field in simultaneity to the confrontation with key existential givens, including nothingness, freedom, responsibility, self-​deception, and desire. These “givens” are a consequence of human consciousness and intersect with the facticity of “givens” via the inescapable experience of human socialization, granting the “body” of forms constituting concrete instances of subjectivity. 28 This is the case even if that “future self ” is an attempt to recover a lost golden moment in the past, such as the cliché midlife crisis in which a man needs to reclaim his lost youth with a younger woman and splashy Porsche. 29 Consider any social-​class identity in terms of possessions and achievements as a set of key markers to attain. In the ideal upper middle-​class lifestyle, these would include an advanced degree, career, marriage, children, travel, and sophisticated home furnishings. The complete package, once attained, however, does not satisfy. There is always an absence internal to every attainment: higher salary, nicer cars, better clothes, ever more exclusive social registers to join.

Bibliography Burgess, Anthony. 1986. A Clockwork Orange. New York. W. W. Norton & Company. Hamilton, J. Paul, et al. 2011. “Modulation of Subgenual Anterior Cingulate Cortex Activity with Real-​Time Neurofeedback.” Human Brain Mapping. 32 (1): 22–​31. Accessed April 11, 2017. europepmc.org/​articles/​PMC3049174 Kaufman, Walter. 2004. Existentialism:  From Dostoevsky to Sartre. New  York: Plume. Malabou, Catherine. 2012. The New Wounded:  From Neurosis to Brain Damage. New York: Fordham University Press. Physics arXiv Blog. 2014. “Why Physicists are Saying Consciousness is a State of Matter, Like a Solid, a Liquid, or a Gas.” Physics arXiv Blog, January 15. medium. com/​the-​physics-​arxiv-​blog/​5e7ed624986d. Sartre, Jean-​Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness. New York: Philosophica Library. Searle, John R. 2004. Mind: A Brief Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

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104  The ontology of consciousness Searle, John R. 2008. Philosophy for a New Century:  Selected Essays. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John R. 2010. Making the Social World. New York: Oxford University Press. Sokolowski, Robert. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Spade, Paul Vincent. 1996. Jean-​ Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Accessed October 10, 2013. pvspade.com/​Sartre/​pdf/​sartre1.pdf.

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4  The ontology of subjectivity

Introduction In its philosophical definition, subjectivity is a “first-​person perspective,” associated with “particular…feelings, beliefs, and desires” that largely if not wholly define the unique character of each human being (Solomon 1995, 857). This definition is not controversial. However, presupposing “subjectivity” are the conditions under which its content comes to be held by particular subjects. Why do subjects have particular beliefs and desires as their subjectivity? This question raises a question about the “sources of the self,” with possible answers ranging from basic instincts to cultural determinants to religio-​mystical communion. The realist thesis presented here is that a first-​ person perspective emerges as the subject negotiates their relations with self, other, and world in the four planes of being. The following accounts of agency, subjectivity, and social structure draw heavily from Margaret Archer’s theory of reflexivity (which she terms reflexive deliberation or the internal conversation), part of her broader ontology of the subject.1 Archer’s argument is grounded in realist assumptions about the mind and the structure of consciousness. Notably, Archer makes explicit use of Searlean philosophy of mind (2007, 24–​25). The point is important: it is incoherent to make a case for the real power of human agency without first accepting the premise that consciousness is real and has emergent causal powers, and hence has ontological stature. As we saw in chapter three, Searle argues that consciousness is an ontologically objective, emergent property of the brain. While consciousness is causally reducible to its biochemical base (thus undermining the argument for dualism), it is not ontologically reducible (thus undermining the argument for elimination).2 In addition, consciousness has a first-​person ontology. It is an ontologically objective feature of the world, and yet only the subject has access to their own conscious experience, because it is impossible to provide a third-​person account of first-​person conscious experiences. Moreover, a first-​person ontology with the power of “spatial and temporal roaming” is the precondition for the possibility of agential causal power to fashion recursively its own trajectory and circumstances via the capacity for reflexive deliberation. At the same time, Archer (2007, 25)  argues

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106  The ontology of subjectivity that because reflexive deliberation “has the causal power to mediate [reproduce/​transform] structural and cultural properties, then it must be irreducible to these emergent social forms.” If it was not the case, any “subjectivity” of individuals would only be the conscious manifestation of determinant sociocultural properties, and any sense of “agency” would only be the role-​playing of preexisting subject positions.3 Agency proper, as DCR defends, is the capacity for deliberate, reasoned, and autonomous “doings, sayings, and makings,” free from social, psychological, and biological determinations. The primary implication entailed by the temporality of consciousness, and perhaps the archetypal capacity of human beings, is the capacity for reflexivity over the contents that “pass through the mind.” Running parallel and in dialectical relation, the meta-​ consciousness of consciousness allows a self-​awareness of what subjects are thinking, feeling, perceiving, doing, saying, and making—​all the ways they go about the world. Through their self-​awareness and reflexive deliberation, subjects monitor their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, form narrations of past experiences, and make future plans. The basic question for social theory, as Margaret Archer points out (2007, 17), is: “what difference does the self-​awareness of its members make to the nature of the social?” All social theory answers this question, but in disparate ways. For idealists, self-​awareness makes “all the difference” because mind has constituted the world (ibid.). For reductive materialists, it makes “no difference at all” because the mind is only an epiphenomenon of brain biochemistry (ibid.). For DCR, self-​awareness indeed makes a difference because it is through human reflexive deliberation that social forms are reproduced or transformed. It is a key precept of DCR that the emergent powers of social forms are activity-​and concept-​dependent on subjects for their existence, activating their potential powers. At the same time, “actually existing agency” is only realized through social-​structural modalities of agency, the latter holding socially inscribed forms of deontological powers (the latter concept will be fully developed in chapter seven). And thus, “human agency” is one aspect of a broader, tripartite conception of agency, whose other two aspects are modalities of “sociocultural agency” and “occupational agency.” These modalities constitute subjectivities with concerns and projects and corresponding identities, desires, motivations, and values which materialize into practice. Furthermore, these modalities usually come in intertwined sets that define groups in terms of collective identity and practices, and thus have sociological significance. In short, reflexivity is the process of active and conscious consideration of who we are and what we are about. It is a process of mediation between the biological aspects of human embodiment and the social aspects of being human. Reflexivity is the mechanism backstopping the autonomy of conscious experience, discursive awareness of the self,4 and deliberation over courses of action. And it is the moment where the sui generis causal powers of both agency and the social world interlock, engendering reproduction or transformation of the sociocultural milieus.

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First-​person perspective, authority, and warrant For reflexivity to play a mediatory role in sociocultural (re)production, Archer argues, two “stances” of the subject-​agent must follow from a first-​person ontology: first-​person perspective and first-​person authority. The postulation of first-​person perspective is the less contentious concept. Even in social-​ constructionist or anti-​humanist theory, the embodied subject is viewed as a “site” or “position” or “standpoint,” from where they perceive the world, can voice their desires and beliefs (however determined), and initiate relevant behaviors. First-​person perspective, in formal terms, has no implicit claim to agency or autonomy in its social mediation. It does, however, presuppose the possibility for the second, more controversial stance of “first-​person authority.” Such “authority” is the crucial addendum to first-​person perspective, giving rise to the capacity for reflexive deliberation as causally efficacious (and to my realist reconstruction of Lacan in the following chapter). For Archer, the paramount claim for first-​person authority is that: Subjects alone have first person authority to know their own minds about objective social factors better than can anyone else. This claim maintains we have special knowledge about ourselves in relation to society that cannot be replaced by a third-​person account, such as that offered by an investigator. If the two were interchangeable, or the investigator’s account was deemed to be superior to the subject’s account in all respects (though it can be in some), then our reflexive Internal Conversation would be redundant in social theory. (Ibid., 26) The concept of first-​person authority should not be confused with “first-​ person epistemic authority” (ibid.) This latter notion posits that beliefs and desires are rationally determined by the individual. Versions of this position, such as Descartes’ “first-​person infallibility” and Hume’s “first-​person omniscience,” hold that the genesis of beliefs and desires is transparent, with reason operating as a surly gatekeeper, ever vigilant to what contents are allowed passage into the mind (ibid.). As Archer notes, the problem with first-​person epistemic authority is that “if there is anything in the psychological notion that we conceal certain beliefs, desires, etc. from ourselves and attribute other beliefs or desires to ourselves,” then theories of the conscious self that garner Cartesian-​like certainty and self-​transparency are “completely undermined” (ibid.). Most if not all people have opaque psychodynamics, and yet this fact is coupled to the phenomenal and nearly ubiquitous experience of self-​ transparency. In the Cartesian view, knowledge of “mental” events” is the only knowledge of the world that can be held with certainty, thus leading to Descartes’ “notorious cogito argument (‘I think, therefore I am’)” (Carruthers 2008, 30). For Descartes, mental events are always conscious, precluding

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108  The ontology of subjectivity preconscious and unconscious effects on conscious experience. Undermining self-​transparency exposes potential gaps between “who we are” and “who we think we are” in the Cartesian modes of seeing, hearing, thinking, judging, and deciding. Carruthers (ibid.) notes that Descartes’ transparency thesis does not extend to “stored, inactive, states like memories and standing-​state beliefs” or “dispositional mental properties like irascibility and generosity,” which, in light of “common sense,” are unreliable or “hard to access.” Descartes’ thesis does extend to modes of cognition, on which he seeks to secure knowledge in virtue of transparency of the process when perceiving, thinking, etc. Carruthers, however, argues the human “mind-​reading capacity…lacks direct access, not only to the processes that issue in novel beliefs, desires, and plans, but also to the ensuing events (especially judgments and decisions) themselves” (ibid., 28, 36). From the first, instances of “hypnosis” to “magnetic stimulation of motor cortex” to “split-​brain” experiments, the mind is easily fooled into thinking it causes a behavior, ignorant of the external cause (by the power of suggestion, electrical shocks, etc.), giving rise to false attribution by “confabulating” an explanation in place of transparent introspection of what actually occurred (ibid., 37). In the same way, the processes giving rise to “beliefs, desires, and plans” are not transparent. Mental events, on the plane of phenomenal experience of consciousness, and taken as self-​evident and transparent, are generated by a “swift interpretative activity” and “never immediately accessible to their subjects” because they are an “unconscious” operation (ibid., 36).5 Subjects own up to their mental events:  they believe this, plan that, and constantly desire things, which seems transparent. Forming a “belief,” however, does not usually contain its conditions of possibility, formative history, and background of other beliefs that allow the singular belief to cohere in a larger “belief system.” Though Carruthers does not give an account of unconscious interpretative structures, which are part and parcel of “belief-​forming” and “desire-​forming systems,” the implication of his analysis suggests these interpretive structures are composed of individual psychodynamics and cultural logics, ideologies, values, etc. and their interplay (ibid., 35). Subjects, when pushed, can usually give a reason for their beliefs, desires, and judgments. What are neither self-​ transparent nor readily available to introspection are the formative reasons why they “reason” as they do, which thus undermines the possibility for first-​ person infallibility and the secure epistemological foundation for knowledge of the self in its relations with the world around, including “oneself.” Archer notes that although psychoanalysis has demonstrated that psychodynamics undermine self-​ mastery—​ the subject’s desires often concealed, beliefs often delusions, and feelings out of whack—​this, however, “does not undermine first-​person authority,” because the “recovery of authority by patients over an attitude [sub-​and preconscious beliefs or desires] is often the only evidence that it was there prior to the therapeutic suggestion” (2007, 26). Once unconscious materials are brought to light by

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The ontology of subjectivity 109 recognizing their effects, analysands gain first-​person authority over their content. The capacity of first-​person authority to “know one’s own mind,” however, is highly contingent. It can never be presumed a priori in theoretical terms. Coming to terms with the objective social factors conditioning the self, and knowledge of one’s self-​psychology, is a function of an adequate mixture of curiosity/​motivation, intellectual capacity, and favorable material conditions (especially time and money). Consciously unknown (“hidden”) beliefs and desires can—​in principle—​be brought to light under first-​person authority with an impulse toward incorporating unconscious motivations and assumptions. The claim of first-​person authority is more modest than first-​person epistemic authority; nonetheless, once a subject has conscious belief or desire in mind, the subject is entitled to first-​person self-​warrant. When the subject “truly belie[ves]” she is “thinking (or feeling) X at the moment; ipso facto, [she] is justified in claiming to know the state of her belief, even if that belief turns out to be untrue.” That is to say, “what warranted first-​person authority entails is that an agent maybe wrong in her beliefs (and often is) but she cannot be wrong about her beliefs” (ibid., italics Archer’s). Ontological implications of warranted first-​person authority follow. As the emergent structure of human consciousness gives rise to the subject’s ability to reflect (to consciously monitor the stream of intentional states of consciousness), when beliefs and desires manifest “before the mind” they can be owned, considered, and analyzed. Thus, “thinking about our thoughts and desires” holds the possibility of their modification by reflexive deliberation in terms of alteration or rejection (or just “going with the flow”). Moreover, the subject “therefore retains an irreducible property—​and power—​since she acts on her beliefs,” in terms of “public conduct” (ibid.). Moreover, intrinsic to subjects’ reflexivity over their beliefs and desires is the process of “deliberation about things structural and cultural, about the contexts and social situations in which we find ourselves, that determine exactly what we do” (ibid., 27). Thus, in the process of deliberation, the subject (as a private, internal, “subjective” experience) is linked to the external, objective world. The subjective and objective merge, yet remain irreducible to one another because of their relatively independent forms of causal power. Nonetheless, the question is begged: what do subjects consider? What is on the mind and deliberated over?

Concerns→ projects→ practices To capture the dynamic of subjectivity, Archer uses a three-​tiered model that delineates how beliefs and desires move from thought to action, and along the way explains how agential causal power interplays with social forms. This model consists of three interlocking “moments” that, while often experienced by the subject as a seamless process, can be rendered analytically distinct as “tie-​in” points in which human beings become situated as mediatory nodal points of the forever unfolding social process. Through sets of

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110  The ontology of subjectivity concerns, projects, and practices the subject simultaneously becomes deeply connected to their lifeworld and, out of the recursivity of practice, reproduces or transforms the world through the creative praxis of daily life. An agent’s concerns include their values, expectations, and desires. Concerns can be (or not) turned into projects, which involves transmuting general “values” into specific strategies and plans. Practices are the effects. The practices of doing, making, or saying something manifest projects qua concerns in the world. And by means of practices—​of existent subject-​agents, older generations, and the long dead—​intransitive and relatively enduring social forms emerge and form the ontological ground of social reality. In addition, concerns should not be confused with “ideals.” As Archer notes, “ ‘concerns’ can be ignoble, ‘projects’ illegal, and ‘practices’ illegitimate”:  gulags, nuclear weapons, and crimes against humanity are animated by concerns often secreted as projects and whose practice entails horror (2007, 24). Concerns are the core beliefs, values, and desires of the subject, what they care about most, want, and desire in life.6 Archer’s concept is purposely open to ensure inclusion of all possibilities (good and bad), and these should not be thought of as fixed, but rather as dynamic and changing. The concerns the subject-​agent holds typically revolve around religious, political, economic, and social values. Obvious sources of concerns include family, community, nation, money, the good, and self-​fulfillment. The adoption of a set of concerns occurs through social and psychological processes, intertwining as the basic gesture of the subject. By virtue of our desire, stemming from the “lack” or absence at the heart of human existence, whatever concerns we have, in effect, pull us toward their achievement, actualization, or expression in the world.7 Within the Western world, its more autochthonous sources of “life stances” range from secular humanism to Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, and Protestantism, but also include the wide variety of other religious faiths and secular views (Islam, Buddhism, deep ecology, communitarianism, neo-​paganism, and so forth).8 Cultural background plays a strong role in the formation of concerns, and the power of “sociological destiny” operates within societies and across cultures. Individuals growing up in France predominantly speak French and have a Catholic cultural heritage, while a person from Malaysia has Malay and Islam. Identities, values, interests and other sources of concerns are replicated in families and communities. Middle-​class parents tend to raise middle-​class kids. However, central to DCR social theory, and grounded in causal powers materialism, is the ontology of social reproduction and transformation. A gap between the social world and the self grants subject-​agents the capability to reflect on their basic constitutive features of birth, upbringing, and psychic experiences, and the recursive power to overcome their formative effects. People change religions, move to foreign countries, and learn new languages. They fall down and rise up social hierarchies, learn new skills, and seek counseling. They contemplate and change their concerns. No one can gain full self-​transparency and objective knowledge of all conditions of their experience. But neither are subjects locked into their subjectivity.

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The ontology of subjectivity 111 Projects are the attempts by the subject to actualize their concerns in the world. From concerns come a range of personal and collective projects subjects engage in, revolving around political, ethical, spiritual, personal, familial, and economic forms of human conduct.9 Concerns are thus transposed into projects, such as securing food, housing, and sexual partners; and having children, educating oneself, and securing an “eternal afterlife” through religious devotion. It is the intersubjective and aggregate constitution of projects that comprise the basic institutional structures of society, which, in their various capacities, serve to enable the possibility of actualizing projects. Thus, for Western modernity, we find particular institutions of family, law, church, state, economy, etc., and a complex “built environment” of transportation, communication, and energy networks connecting the zones where people live, work, and recreate. In their formation, projects are “subjectively conceived by agents” (stemming from their desires, beliefs, interests, and concerns) as intentional courses of action (Archer 2007, 21). In Archer’s conception, projects are the essential linking mechanism through which agency and structures interlock while remaining ontologically irreducible. As I will elaborate in greater detail below, agents deliberate reflexively on the structural circumstances that may (or may not) condition their project and “design and determine” a course of action. For Archer, these “circumstances” with which projects intersect are precisely the sets of relevant “social emergent properties” whose causal powers of enablement or constraint become activated by agential projects (ibid.). Projects thus trigger the emergent power of social properties into effect, as subject-​agents strive to their completion. Practices are in effect the concrete moment when the “rubber hits the road.” Our concerns animate our projects, which in turn, at some point, become what we do, say, and make. Whether it is playing a game of tennis, hurtling Molotov cocktails, or filling out an application, the social world is instantiated by practice as its empirical expression. As projects entail practice, the agent experiences directly the consequences of projects in terms of success and failure, which in turn leads to an evaluation of their design and strategy. Many emergent powers of social properties are expressed through practice, especially when the projects of differentially located subject-​agents are contradictory and collide. For instance, police officers stand in front of marching protesters. Both groups have concerns and projects. Both, in the act of confrontation with one another, have a course of action in effect, whose eventual outcome will be mediated by practice. Face-​to-​face, in conflict, the protesters obey an officer’s command to disperse; or, the protesters overrun the officers, forcing a retreat of state authority; or, officers beat the protesters into submission and the status quo remains; or, public opinion turns against the officers beating protesters, delegitimating the state. In this example, the “event” of practice can make visible the structural powers in play, and gives rise to the possibility of social transformation, what Archer calls morphogenesis. On the contrary, in the practice of everyday life, many projects (if not all, for dull days on end) are routinized and unproblematic, and pass by

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112  The ontology of subjectivity seemingly without much reflection, effecting social-​structural continuity or morphostasis. Even the most routine and repeated acts, however, require an act of creation ex nihilo: Every morning many people confront the void—​an absence of coffee—​forcing activity to brew a pot. Coffee made, life can continue for another day, ad infinitum. The ordinary can become extraordinary when punctured by rapidly changing conditions. War breaks out, a hurricane hits, banks fail, and conditions arise for social morphogenesis when subject-​ agents must postpone, rework, or jettison projects in response, and change their practices accordingly. The schema of concerns, projects, and practices provides a formal delineation of “the stuff of life” every human being brings to the world, both defining the unique subjectivity of individuals and pinpointing in its analysis the forms through which people deliberate reflexively. Moreover, the key moment where the relatively independent ontological powers of the subjective and objective come into play is at intersection where the capacity for reflexive deliberation and the enablements and constraints of projects are manifested. Before I move forward in the exposition of Archer’s ontology of the subject, I want to raise two important points having to do with the nature of “concerns.” First, subjects typically have multiple concerns which tend to congeal in recognizable modes of identity. Social scientists identify them—​ in Bourdieusian terms, for instance—​as a set of dispositions attached to social place (as a “habitus”).10 While it is useful to recognize and discern the contours of these agglutinations as real sociological categories in terms of shared concerns, projects, and practices, it defies experience that entire classes of people (whether undocumented Latino working-​class people or upper middle-​class Anglo professionals, for example) have identical sets of concerns leading to identical projects. Even if all were identical, it does not follow that the outcomes of all agential reflexive deliberation over the viability of their projects in relation to objective social conditions would necessarily coincide. However similar the dispositions of a sociological category, its members have variegated backgrounds of experience and psycho(patho)logical tendencies, both of which contribute to the singularity of all individuals and thus inevitably inflect their projects and practical outcomes, in terms of both variations in choice (public conduct) and motivations. Second, the question of the origin of concerns should be a front and center “concern,” because the origin of the subject’s concerns has both social and psychoanalytical aspects. Archer argues that “being an ‘active agent’ hinges on the fact that individuals develop and define their ultimate concerns…, whose precise constellation makes for their concrete singularity as persons” (2007, 24). I agree with Archer over the importance of concerns for the constitution of a “first-​person subjectivity.” However, I find Archer’s conceptualization of ultimate concerns as “developed” and “defined” too consciously rational, too Cartesian, too “agential.” It is precisely at this point in the DCR theorization of agency inherent in subjectivity that an intervention or supplementation of theoretical psychoanalysis seems to have benefit. For now,

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The ontology of subjectivity 113 I want to foreshadow the following chapter by noting that a central task of psychoanalytical theory is to model how beliefs and desires operate in the (mal)formation of the subject, and this task directly bears on the origins of “concerns.” The genesis of a subject’s concerns is profoundly bound up with mechanisms of socialization that operate, at least initially in childhood, more or less unconsciously. Basic modes of sociocultural identity and values begin to sediment in the subject, as soon as they enter the language of their nativity (if not before). The interplay between psychic processes and the social field—​ the psychodynamics of socialization—​is the link between social ontological investigation and psychoanalytical theory. Whereas the agent’s ability to “subjectively determine” projects and consciously execute practices entails a high degree of self-​awareness intrinsic to these capacities, the nature of “concerns” limits agents’ awareness of and insight into their formation. As I will explore, the Lacanian mechanisms of socialization operating at the subconscious level, giving rise to the basic shape of the subject’s subjectivity, is shot through with concerns from without, likely incoherent and certainly ideologically derived. Concerns can be held unconsciously (or preconsciously), the phenomenological experience of which can seem like a “natural aspect” or “biological program” of the self. Concerns “held dear” can also originate from the local discursive-​ ideological complex, out of which subjects uncritically accept dictates, values, and ego ideals of what it means to be “normal,” well adjusted, happy, etc. The question of psychopathology can be laid in two analytically separate moments in psychic life. First is the question of the origin of these “concerns.” Have they been imposed on the subject in a context of determinative power, under which the analysand begins to chafe? Second is the question of how analysands experience their projects and practices. In this regard, the focus is not on “concerns” per se, but when their mediation by the subject-​agent in the execution of practices qua projects has become deformed and ineffective because of character defects, past traumas, psychopathologies, poor decision-​making skills, etc. In chapter five I  will explore these themes and the value of psychoanalytical theory to elaborate the ontology of the subject and argue reflexivity is the condition of possibility for the therapeutic value of subjectivization of personal psychodynamics. In the final analysis, nonetheless, the goal of theoretical penetration of the self and society is to come to terms with these “unknown knowns” and confront them personally, ethically, and politically. Returning now to reflexive deliberation in the matrix of the agent-​structure interaction in terms of social reproduction and potentials for transformation, I come back to Archer and spotlight the process by which reflexivity triggers the causality of social forms.

The causal power of reflexive deliberation The claim made above for warranted first-​person authority provides an essential component in the ontology of the subject. It gives first-​person accounts

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114  The ontology of subjectivity (as opposed to third-​person analysis) a high degree of theoretical value. It justifies the ontological significance of a subject exercising their capacity to monitor the flow of conscious intentional states and behaviors. However mistaken, deluded, or under cult mind-​control, the self-​informed stance of a “first person” (subjectivity) remains inexorably entwined with the power to deliberate on the content and meaning of this flow and to make good and bad choices over the definition of concerns, direction of projects, and efficacy of practices. Warranted first-​person authority ultimately underpins a general point developed in the course of this book: “social agency,” in terms of the reproduction or transformation of the objective social world, cannot be explained without recourse to a theory of subjectivity and examination of individual subjective experiences. As a “product in process” of becoming, subjectivity cannot but reconstitute itself by reflexivity and deliberation. In the following section (perhaps the pivotal moment in this book), I explicate Archer’s model of how social forms are mediated through the projects of agents. The central premise in DCR social theory holds that agents and structures are ontologically irreducible to one another. This claim entails they each hold relatively independent, sui generis causal powers, and militates against competing social theories granting the exclusive power and priority of their side of “determinism” to either agents or social forms (Archer 2007, 18). Ontological irreducibility in terms of causality compels a model of the agent-​structure relationship able to account for their fusion and interplay. The theoretical complication, requiring careful elaboration, follows from the equally central premise that “the causal power of social forms is mediated through social agency” (Bhaskar 1998, 25–​26). This latter point has three consequences. First, it overcomes deficiencies arising out of the bipolarity of volunteerism contra structuralism in social theory. The problem of “volunteerism” is avoided because the causal powers of social forms enable and constrain agent projects, and the problem of “reification” is avoided because social forms cannot express their causal powers without agents activating these powers through their projects. Second, it gives proper ontological respect to the causal powers that manifest in both human agents and social forms. Third, it identifies a process of mediation as the central mechanism by which social forms are realized in the world through human agency. If the powers involved are non-​reducible and yet causally interactive, the process of “mediation” marks how these powers operate “through” subjectivity, or what Archer describes as a process of “social conditioning” (2007, 18). For Archer, this process: Firstly…involves a specification of how structural and cultural powers impinge upon agents, and secondly, of how agents use their own personal powers to act “so rather than otherwise” in such situations. Thus there are two elements involved, the “impingement upon” (which is objective) and the “response to it” (which is subjective). (Ibid., 19)

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The ontology of subjectivity 115 Thus, the two sides, the subjective and objective, come together in an interplay of the basic capacities inherent in consciousness (for temporal and spatial monitoring—​the basis of “reflexive deliberation”) and social forms. The first remark to make is the necessity of distinguishing between the “objective existence” of the emergent causal power of reflexive agency and the “objective existence” of emergent causal powers associated with social forms (ibid., 21). It is also necessary to distinguish social forms from the “exercise of their causal powers, since the realization of their causal powers requires them to be activated by agents” (ibid.). In other words, the causal powers of social structure and cultural forms are only activated by reflexive agents through their projects and practices. The second remark is that the first-​person perspective of human subjectivity is coextensive with various modalities of personhood and sets of beliefs and desires, the latter contents which are necessarily bestowed—​ at least initially—​on the subject as social antecedents (language, objective material conditions, and social forms).11 In other words, the emergent powers of human agency are “tractionless” and unintelligible without a substantializing sociocultural context, as its presupposition for the individual to join “the world” and as a condition of possibility for intelligible expression in this world. These social antecedents, furthermore, generally mark the subject as a “person of the times,” shaped by a geohistorical context of structural and cultural forms. The causal responsibility for the present set of social relations and institutions falls on subject-​agents in the past, through their doings, sayings, and makings, comprising social antecedents for subject-​agents in the future. Contemporary subject-​agents are confronted with this legacy, which forms the context of any “next minute” consideration of a project or intention in practice.12 Thus, the full circle made here—​human agency, operating through subjectivity, mediates social forms, while only through social forms does human agency actualize in the world—​renders universal and ontological features in answer to the classic agent-​structure problem. Subject-​agents reproduce or transform social forms through their reflexive deliberations, and social forms enable or constrain agents through their emergent powers. The process of mediation of agency and social forms thus lies at the heart of subjectivity: “that gives both objectivity and subjectivity their due and also explicitly incorporates their interplay” (ibid., 28). In Archer’s theory of subjectivity, the “process of mediation” has three “stages”:  (1) “structural and cultural properties objectively shape the situations agents confront involuntarily, and possess generative power of constraint and enablement in relation to them”; (2) “agents’ own configuration of concerns, as subjectively defined in relation to the three orders of natural reality”—​“natural, practical, and social-​[discursive]”13; and (3) “courses of action are produced through the reflexive deliberation of agents who subjectively determine their practical projects in relation to their objective circumstances” (ibid., italics Archer’s). These stages are primary components of social ontology and constitute a social metatheory. They undergird substantive social theory by showing why it is important to

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116  The ontology of subjectivity incorporate accounts of subjectivity, informed by the capacity of reflexive deliberation in the projects of agents, in a model of the social that grants both agents and structures relatively independent and ontologically grounded causal powers. I now turn to examine these claims in more detail.

Confronting reality The first stage marks the fact human subjects confront at every moment objective “structural and cultural properties,” an inescapable set of circumstances with which they contend yet which are frequently misunderstood or unperceived. Starting at birth, the ever-​present powers of socialization and enculturation are brought to bear in the formation of human subjectivity. Who the subject becomes and the social powers the subject acquires in its particularity are formed in the matrix of general constituents of a human being: on the one hand, variables of genetics, phenotype, and personality, and on the other, variables of geohistorical moment and social position. Set in time and place, in language and culture, and further positioned by social distinctions and hierarchies demarcated by race, gender, class, caste, etc., the formation of a human subject is contingent and involuntary. At the same time, the milieu of social forms subject-​agents confront is real, emergent, and causally efficacious. Its objectivity is grounded in the temporal sequence relating past and present agents. In Archer’s words: Given their pre-​existence, structural and cultural emergents shape the social environment to be inhabited. These results of past actions are deposited in the form of current situations. They account for what there is (structurally and culturally) to be distributed and also for the shape of such distributions; for the extant role array, the proportion of positions available at any time and the advantages/​disadvantages associated with them; for the institutional configuration present and for those second order emergent properties of compatibility and incompatibility, that is whether the respective operations of institutions are matters of obstruction or assistance to one another. In these ways, situations are objectively defined for their subsequent occupants or incumbents. (2007, 28, quoted from Archer 1995, 201) Initially, the subject out of nativity is highly circumscribed and determined, but through the process of maturation, subject-​agents attempt, with more or less success, to self-​determine with some degree of “autonomy of the will.” Nonetheless, despite the existential freedom to do otherwise, most people follow well-​settled pathways throughout the social field, such as class ambitions (“what should I  study at the university?”), gender codes (“dude, you need to man up”), economic activity (“I want to be rich!”), and ethnonational identity (“I feel like a Bulgarian; I desire what is Bulgarian; I am Bulgarian”).

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The ontology of subjectivity 117 With the above notion of “objective social and cultural properties” in mind, to reassert their ontological reality in terms of causality requires a return to the concept of “projects.” Projects are planned, formed, or articulated in a context of preexisting objective sociocultural properties whose emergent properties are material causal powers of enablement and constraint. For Archer, the projects subject-​agents undertake in the course of their lives mobilize the causal power of these properties. The importance of projects lies in their simple yet inherent teleology: projects are considered successful when accomplished or completed, effecting some sort of change in the subject. Projects thus, in DCR terms, have intrinsic design to “negate” an absence by their realization. The temporal dimension involved from project formation to project completion opens a space of contingency, in which both the powers existing in the social field and the power of the agent bear upon the viability of a project. Granting that agents have some basic level of commitment to the success of a project, the relationship between projects and social structures is always either one of “congruence” or “incongruence.” As Archer notes: “the obvious point is that a constraint requires something to constrain and an enablement needs something to enable” (ibid., 20). Projects “activate” structural properties such that “if there is congruence, this represents enablement and if there is incongruence, that constitutes constraint” (ibid., 21).14 Projects which are enabled (there being no constraint) are usually unremarkable instances of social reproduction (or morphostasis) as they follow established pathways, maintain the status quo, and pose no threat to the existing social order. Projects which are constrained (by sanction, oppression, lack of opportunity, and/​ or the absence of power, money, prestige, etc. required to attain completion of a project) can give rise to social transformation born from frustration and social contradiction. While lone individual attempts to overcome social constraints inhibiting one’s projects can solve immediate and singular problems, when engendered by groups of people with a common interest, collective action to overcome constraint can result in social transformation (or morphogenesis). On the one hand, particular constraints can become politicized, such as social movements to overturn oppressive social hierarchies configured by political, economic, and symbolic power.15 On the other, it is worth noting instances of morphogenesis prompted not by a progressive agenda of enhanced freedom, but the opposite tendency toward increased social regulation or oppression by informal censure, legal and security measures, and/​or violence. While DCR is correct in its supposition of a “pulse of freedom” operating in the dialectics of social change, the “pulse of fear and domination” has its day, frequently and with gusto. When faced with constraints, nonetheless, the range of responses by the agent can vary, from “compliance” and resignation,16 to “evasion and strategic action,” to outright “subversion” and revolution (Archer 2007, 21). Agential creativity in practical terms of executing a project assures a wide range of possible outcomes. The formulation of agential projects axiomatically involves appreciation of whatever relevant objective

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118  The ontology of subjectivity conditions that can enable or constrain the project. Agents have control of their costs, degree of commitment, and patience to see a project succeed in the face of obstacles, and this applies to a “project” as mundane as fixing dinner as well as extraordinary ones such as running for political office, writing a first novel, or crossing a border illegally to seek a better life. The constraining power of social properties can also demotivate subject-​agents, whether in the form of explicit obstacles or, crucially, when the obstacle is merely anticipated and its power works without being actualized to stymie a project. Social scientists should never underestimate the forces anticipated by deliberation because their effects though unseen have causal efficacy. For instance, the power of law to inflict fines, incarceration, or censure has a constraining and disciplinary effect on social behavior. Many acts of politeness and good manners entail self-​censure to maintain a patina of civility and bonhomie. Likewise, levels of income constrain people, as they make decisions about housing, transportation, and what social circles they might join. Constraints also attach “different opportunity costs to the same course of action to different parts of the population” (ibid., 22). Higher or lower opportunity costs for the same project can result in different strategies and actions by differentially located subject-​agents.17 The decision of one agent to pay the cost while another declines is ultimately a matter of deliberation and not an effect of an external social determinant/​social hydraulics. The unequal costs of similar projects or availability of projects to some and not others is how “life chances” or social destiny exert their causal power through the unequal distribution of economic and symbolic resources throughout a society.18 In addition, if agents fail to adequately or accurately assess, understand, and anticipate the contexts and circumstances of social forms, then they “pay an objective price whether or not they do so comprehendingly” (ibid., 28). Furthermore, Archer stresses that uniform responses to constraints (or enablements) are rare. Out of the vagaries of agent-​subjects’ assessment of relevant conditions that intersect with their projects, “the one thing that is rarely, if ever, found is a complete uniformity of response on behalf of every agent who encounters the same constraint or the same enablement” (ibid., 21). Statistical regularities within societies provide evidence that social occurrences, processes, and structures are emergent in scale, but such empirical regularities provide neither psychoanalytic nor ethnographic insight into the motivations and reasons behind individual participation in “group-​think” or “group-​do.”

Subjectifying the three orders of natural reality The second stage of mediation between the subjective and objective, in Archer’s schema, grounds the development of “concerns” in relation to the “three orders of natural reality” (ibid., 28). As inherent and universal

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The ontology of subjectivity 119 to humankind, the “natural, practical, and social-​[discursive]” orders identify three general domains of subjective relations to three different objective features of humankind. The natural order pertains to the condition people experience of their “embodiment,” which inescapably entails basic biological realities of nourishment and hydration, pleasure and pain, walking, climbing, sleeping, and so on. Out of the natural order arise concerns for “physical well-​being,” basic bodily maintenance, and self-​preservation, such as the fear of drowning (Archer 2003, 199). The practical order connects agents to the teleological value in their praxis. People are constantly doing and making things. They undertake a vast array specific goal-​directed endeavors with an expectation of success and a level of competence to do so. Concerns surrounding “performative achievement,” such as cooking a meal, writing an essay, or carrying out open-​heart surgery, are directly tied to the hope and expectation that completing the act will bring forth a desired end and benefit (ibid.). Finally, the social-​discursive order designates agents’ sense of “self-​ worth” (or self-​definition), whereby, on the one hand, their identities and social standing are recognized through their interpersonal relations (ibid.). Concerns arise out of a “sense of oneself ” in direct relation to the “sense of the other” defining, judging, and “sizing up” the self. On the other hand, agents develop concerns in their relationship with the existent sociocultural milieu. The social-​discursive order compels people to make value judgments, conform to or rebel against given expectations, and “pick a side” on who they try to be through various facets of social life:  political, religious, occupational, familial, etc. People “concern” themselves with attaining world power or world peace, seeking heaven or good sex, bearing children or being a nun. All human concerns have at root a relation to these orders, which manifest teleological directives for their promotion, ultimately manifesting in particular projects and everyday practices. The orders are also inescapable: there is no “opt-​out” clause or “off-​the-​grid” existence. The forms of knowledge garnered and types of concerns developed in each order entail different degrees of reflexivity: in the natural order the need for reflexive deliberation is “minimal,” for the practical order “moderate,” and for the social order “maximal” (Archer 2010b, 132). Out of the social-​discursive order formed by intrasubjective relations, the agent’s worldview of concerns and place in the social world requires maximal reflexivity to “get  along in life.” The concerns arising from the natural and practical orders as a result of subject-​ object relations of “embodiment” and “know-​how” require much less reflexivity, because the barriers to “not falling down the stairs” or “getting a good night’s sleep” or “learning to play the mandolin” are intrinsic to the activity or skill. Constraints within the social-​discursive order are more opaque, complex, and frequently insurmountable, necessitating greater activation of reflexivity to overcome. In addition, as Archer notes, projects that advance in one order can cause deterioration in the others. For instance, with Charlie Parker’s stellar growth in his performative competence on the alto saxophone and his immediate rise in social stature came a tragic decline in his health and

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120  The ontology of subjectivity social relationships from heroin and alcohol abuse. Moreover, the question, raised above is the level of discursive penetration into the conditions by which subject-​agents “subjectively determine” their concerns, an issue to be explored further in chapter five.

The mechanism of deliberation While the first stage of mediation dealt with objective powers of sociocultural conditions, and the second with the three orders of natural reality around which human concerns revolve, the third stage of mediation in the relation between the subjective and objective is the capacity and process of reflexive deliberation. For Archer, this capacity is the central mechanism of mediation, and as a social-​theoretical concept it is traditionally overlooked in social theory. By virtue of this capacity, agents can deliberate reflexively on their “courses of action” in relation to their “objective circumstances” (2007, 28). Out of the constellation of beliefs, desires, social positions, and identities that generate specific concerns, agents “subjectively determine their practical projects” that advance the actualization of concerns (ibid., 28). Agents assess the practicability and “feasibility” of their projects in relation to the objective circumstances confronting the agent. Such deliberation is “certainly fallible, certainly incomplete, and necessarily under our own description because that is the only way we know anything” (ibid., 23). But nobody said being human was easy! Subject-​agents subsist in social milieus with norms, laws, and values; structures of power and resource distribution (usually unequal); and an array of social, political, and economic institutions. In this dynamic context of enablements and constraints, agents adjust and rejig projects, “abandoning them if deemed hopeless” or perhaps enlarging them if deemed successful (ibid., 28). In the mediation of the subjective and objective, the ontological importance of projects stems from their position in consciousness (when agents conceive of a project and then deliberate on the means to achieve its success) and their intrinsic sociocultural properties. There is a simultaneity of operations in effect that joins the agential capacity for reflexive deliberation over a project at the same time projects activate the causal powers of structural and cultural forms. From the banal to the grandiose, the creation of projects is thus the key moment of mediation because the causal powers of social properties are only “expressed in the pursuit of a project” (ibid.). And causal power of reflexive agency enables subjects “to design and determine their responses to the structured circumstances in which they find themselves” (ibid., 20). Whether procuring food for dinner, fixing a broken window, or learning the derivatives trade in hopes of millions, agents must subjectively determine (at least at the conscious level) how to achieve the project at hand. Projects involving money activate economic properties involving interest rates, banks, and trust; educational projects activate properties of access and opportunity within the confines of educational institutions (and economic ones); employment

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The ontology of subjectivity 121 projects can activate the powers of demographic properties (too old, too young, too ethnic), gender imbalances (glass ceiling), and social networks (“it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”). Consequently, in the ontology of the subject, the essential nature of the peculiarity of human beings is the causal power of agency derived from the capacity for reflexive deliberation. In no way does the process of deliberation ensure epistemic certainty of knowledge of the relevant material and ideological conditions in which projects are undertaken. At the same time, it is possible for subject-​agents to penetrate deeply into the nature of their contextual conditions. Though much of daily life is rote and habitual behavior, at any given point, given warranted first-​person authority, and in principle, subjects can articulate propositionally an explanation of their practices as part of larger projects, and the nature of the concerns so manifesting. Even when informed by false beliefs, and however flawed in its execution, reflexive deliberation is a conscious process of decisions and strategies of how best to proceed with a project. On the one hand, the objective side operates as the conditions of possibility for most if not all socially meaningful and intelligible practices. On the other, the emergent causal powers of human agency give rise to subjects with “the ability to make variable responses under the same objective social circumstances” (ibid, 22). Nonetheless, a crucial theoretical point is that the repetition of similar and successful projects across the space-​time of a society engenders regular pathways of routine actions and an enduring social-​structural and institutional reality. In all, the present material meshwork of structural and cultural powers remains activated through project-​practices. The existence of these powers is generally the result of prior deliberation over, and subsequent routinization of, projects by past generations, who are causally responsible for the longue durée of structural and cultural forms, viz., the doxa.

The “tripartite character” of agency In the previous sections of this chapter, I have explicated Archer’s ontology of subjectivity grounded in the capacity for reflexive deliberation on the one hand, and the complex of concerns, projects, and practices on the other. In order to “give both subjectivity and objectivity their due,” Archer (2007, 28) shows how the two “interplay” in the reproduction and transformation of social forms when projects trigger the causal powers of enablement and constraint. In accordance with “practical materialism,” agential powers are actualized in the form of “embodied, intentional causality” as a capacity to effect change in something (including themselves). In the preceding section, Archer shows that agency involves reflexive deliberation over “subjectively determined” concerns and projects which immediately interlace the subject’s projects and the objective social reality. In this section, I  will develop the concept of “projects” to account for the manifold abilities and obligations accorded to individuals by virtue of their positioning throughout a social system. To this point, Wight (2006, 212) argues the form of agential power

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122  The ontology of subjectivity stemming from reflexive deliberation, as a “ ‘freedom of subjectivity’ ” (Wight, quoting Spivak 1996, 294), is necessary to the concept of agency but “not sufficient because agents in the social world are differentially located and many of their powers are a direct result of their social positioning.” The abstract sense of agency as a capacity to “effect change” must be wedded to concrete senses of agency to effect changes in something, and the objective realm of “something” is the existent beliefs, desires, and social forms which subject-​ agents embody and subjectify. The relationship between agency and social positioning—​the subjective and objective—​in vivo is one of copresence. The reflexive capacity of the agent-​subject requires always that the subject be an agent of “something,” and DCR argues two broad categories of possible material conditions “flesh out” the intrinsic causal power of agency, giving the latter “real-​world” powers of social agency. In this section, I again draw from Archer (1995, 254) to expand the concept of “agency” in light of her account of a “stratified model of people” consisting of “Persons, Agents, and Actors.” To slightly complicate the matter, I employ Wight’s (2006, 213–​14) version of the stratified model of people, in which he renders Archer’s three strata as the “tripartite character” of agency: “agency1, agency2, and agency3.”19 In the tripartite model, agency1 is the formal capacity for reflexivity in service to the subjective determination of projects and concerns (with my caveats). Agency1 is an intrinsic and universal feature of homo sapiens’ “species being,” forming the power of human agency (ibid., 211). Agency2, sociocultural forms of agency, is the agential powers associated with the subject’s general emplacement (or “thrownness”) within a sociocultural field, pertaining most saliently to language and the “social groups and collectivities…into which persons are born and develop” (ibid., 213). In contrast, agency3 is occupational forms of agency, constituted by powers, rights, and liabilities garnered within the structure of specific social positions. Agency3 is equivalent, as Wight notes, to Bhaskar’s concept (1998, 45)  of “positioned-​practices” (e.g., corporate vice president, foster parent, and secretary of state), which has the theoretical advantage of not implying any “normative content or potential script which agency1 simply must follow” (ibid., 214). The positions of agency3 are emergent and (relatively) enduring “structural properties” that are independent of, and irreducible to, the agents1 who come to “occupy them” (ibid., 214). By distinguishing between human agency1 and the modalities of agential power, agency2 and agency3, Archer provides a compelling model of how the powers of human agency are mediated by social forms at the same time these forms are a condition of possibility for subject-​agents to act “causally” in the world. Wight notes, “these distinctions do not refer to different people, but are ontologically different aspects of the same person,” precluding either the ontological conflation or reduction of these modalities to one another (ibid., 215). Archer’s claim (2003, 190)  that “human being is logically and ontologically prior to social being” discloses in more precise terms that the structure of consciousness giving rise to the reflexive power of human

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The ontology of subjectivity 123 agency1 is the emergence basis for the composition of social forms of agency2 and agency3. This ontological fact is reconciled with the existential fact that subjects “become agency2 before [they] become agency1 and agency3” (Wight 2006, 215, paraphrasing Archer 1995). The apparent contradiction between these two facts is resolved by recourse to DCR depth ontology, where the “transfactuality” of the causal power of reflexivity only manifests in social conditions and thus as “actual.” In other words, only through the process of enculturation with respect to agency2 can the powers of agency1 (and agency3) “actually” exist. The innate capacity for reflexivity is the basis for the ontology of agency1, but its presence in the world as a contribution to reproducing and transforming society only occurs when mediated by the sociocultural field of agency2 (in terms of language acquisition, identity, etc.) and occupational forms of agency3, both of which manifest subjectively determined projects-​ in-​practice. All three levels of agency must therefore be considered together when considering a person. Subjectivity—​as a first-​person perspective of beliefs and desires—​thus forms out of the matrix of the tripartite schema of agency123, forming the basis of subject-​agents’ relative social power, motivations, and projects. For DCR, sociocultural forms of agency2 consists of the sociocultural field of nativity. Individuals are born involuntarily into a given time and place, within family, and into a preexisting field of social meanings and built environments. Human subjectivity is realized only in its historical setting and people come to be fully human through various systems of socialization, which produces the distinctions and categories of human differences. Being born into a progressive Jewish family residing in Manhattan will have different consequences than being born into a relatively poorer family of Scottish-​ Irish descent whose faith is Southern Baptist and whose home is Huntsville, Alabama. The differentiation of the social collective is reproduced through the identities so embraced—​being Jewish and relatively “urbane” versus being scriptural and from “the South.” The formative dimension of the sociocultural field thus brings into focus the “link” between “agency…and identity,” as individuals become agents of the groups and collectivities to which they are attached and the associated beliefs, interests, lifestyles, and practices that distinguish their identity (Wight 2006, 215). As agents of agency2, subjects only inhabit a portion of the sociocultural totality, and for example, a person’s recognized gender at birth is the first of many points whereby the sociocultural collective becomes differentiated by a variety of contingent circumstances, and, as subjects develop self-​ independence, by the concerns and projects they self-​determine. Because agents are differentially located in their society by virtue of their gender, phenotype, class, etc., sociocultural systems are not monolithic, bounded, or necessarily cohesive. In broad terms, human agents1 are subjectified (and objectified) in respect to the force of “relational properties,” such as “privileged/​ underprivileged,” marked/​unmarked, stigmatized/​unstigmatized (ibid.). Subjects learn

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124  The ontology of subjectivity a language and a dialect, attain a level of education and skill set (whether informally or formally), and come to be recognized in terms of categories of identity:  gender, national and/​or ethnic affiliation, religio-​ethical traditions, subgroups, and lifestyles, which are frequently (if not always) cross-​cut by differential levels of access to material and symbolic resources, typically conceptualized in terms of class or caste background. Agency2, consequently, accounts for the vast differentiation of privileges which adhere to differences of personhood:  the groups, collectivities, and identities to which subjects belong. Erving Goffman (1986) provides a useful analytic framework to examine the symbolic casting of human differences in terms of privilege and hierarchy, flowing from the dichotomy of “stigmatized” and “unstigmatized” categories of the person. Goffman argues that within a given sociocultural milieu, stigmatized identities typify those features that are subordinate or problematized, in contrast to those considered unmarked or “normal.” For example, in the United States unmarked categories of the person are traditionally those qualities of individuals who are white, male, Protestant, and heterosexual, while stigmatized categories are “other”:  people who are of color, female, poor, gay, transgendered, disabled, disfigured, and so on. Nonetheless, subject-​agents are not locked in permanently (ontologically) to many of their positions in the sociocultural field. The position of subjects in the realm of agency2 is not static, but a dynamic process, ongoing through their lifespan, as they migrate, change lifestyles, and come to new beliefs and identities—​a life marked by the possibility for alteration and transformation. People change, and the ascriptive categories of their personhood change. Even for relatively fixed positions pertaining to the body (of the natural order), the meanings and categories of gender, phenotype, and sexuality are in flux. The definition and the nature of powers associated with a social position can be analyzed, criticized, and negotiated, not infrequently in political struggle. In this sense, the history of civil rights movement during the 20th and early 21st centuries in the United States has been the overthrow of the formal (legal, economic, and political) subordination of those individuals ascribed to stigmatized categories. The relationship of identity to sociocultural agency highlights the definitive expression of a socialized “self ” in relation to their geohistorical situation and the concrete universality of the four planes, which combine (1) an ideological component (of values, beliefs, worldview, and narrative—​self-​ ascribed or imposed by others); (2) a social-​structural component (of social positions and/​or hierarchical and differential access to resources and power); and (3) a set of projects developed in relation to the three orders of natural reality and the culturally grounded rhythmics of life (daily, weekly, yearly, and over a life span). The inescapable process of enculturation, binding agents1 to a “time and place not of their choosing or making,” explains why agency2 has existential priority before human agency and occupational agency, for the sociocultural is the womb, so to speak, from which other forms of agency are born.

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The ontology of subjectivity 125 The third facet of agency, that of occupational forms of agency3, is positions covering occupations and roles associated with informal and formal institutions across social, political, and economic domains—​public and private—​such as the military, state, corporation, family, and church. The jobs people hold, the various roles they attain or grow into, and the positions of authority and subservience they assume—​sometimes by choice, sometimes forced by circumstance—​are the highest-​order emergent forms of agency. In Western modernity, they include economic positions such as renter, landlord, wage-​income earner, and investment-​income earner; political positions including citizen, mayor, and voter; and social positions including adult, parent, and spouse. These examples of occupational positions are derived from, and fairly typical of, social structures in late-​modern liberal societies. Other civilizations and cultures, and even “our” past, would likely have much different types of roles and occupations according to different political, economic, and sociocultural orders. For example, occupational structures radically differ in the age of monarchical rule in Europe, the caste system in India, Native American tribal orders, and Communist Party rule in the Soviet Union. As argued above, central to the nature of agency3 (and in a more general way for agency2), the relatively independent ontological existence of the social structure and sets of relations that constitute its various positions is justified by the fact that they preexist individual agents1 who come to occupy these positions. The definition of a position and its explicit deontological powers (duties, liabilities, rights, powers of decision-​making and control over material and symbolic resources, etc.) has been determined and constituted by other agents removed in time. Agents acting in regard to the social positions they occupy engage in projects relevant to the position—​to get the job done right, raise perfect children, serve and protect; or to avoid being fired, demoted, thrown out on the street by one’s spouse, and so on. Simultaneous to the reproduction of a social position, whether lawyer, librarian, or US Air Force lieutenant colonel, is the reproduction of the specific causal powers “to do” associated with the position. Medical doctors can prescribe drugs; judges can administer justice; members of Congress can vote for war. The agential capacity for reflexive praxis in the reproduction or transformation of social forms, which exert powers of enablement and constraint, thus sets the stage for one’s future self or even far-​future generations who occupy the same positions and assume their powers. The position of corporate CEO can be filled by many different people, but the primary duty of a CEO is to insure the company is profitable. This position hands to an agent a set of projects with vested interests and powers that must be adopted by whoever is hired as the CEO. If a CEO, exercising their reflexive intentionality, decides the pursuit of profit should be subordinated to the pursuit of public goods, their individual volition will likely not alter the prerogatives and liabilities of the CEO position. They will have to leave, vacating the CEO role for somebody willing to be “effective.”

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126  The ontology of subjectivity In all, agents are enabled to express the latent possibilities of agency1—​ human agency—​only as it merges with the social field. Archer’s tripartite conception of agency has the merit of showing how the subjective interlocks with the objective to render analytically the ontological difference between human agents on the one hand, and the roles and positions they inhabit on the other. Failure to do so can obfuscate the powers of reflexivity and creativity exercised by agency1 in relation to the privileges, powers, and liabilities associated with the positions. Each must be given its “due,” as the bidirectional mediation of each to the other is necessary for all levels of agency to substantiate in the social world. The tripartite character of agency also resolves the relation between agents and structures. Opposing individualist accounts (which view structures as epiphenomena of agents’ behavior) and structuralist accounts (which view agents as epiphenomena of structure), Archer’s theory of agency as it relates to subjectivity reveals the irreducible powers of both agents and structures and how they interlock. Wight notes (2006, 215), “this requires a model of the ‘social actor’ who is neither a passive puppet of social forces, nor a pre-​social Cartesian self.” Determinist structural accounts, of “downwards conflation” in Archer’s terms (1995, 3), restrict conceptions of subjectivity to sociocultural and/​or occupational modes of agency—​the subject as automaton, cipher, effect of power—​failing to grasp how embodied, reflexive intentionality situates subjects in a sociocultural context in “real time” while giving them purchase (to a greater or lesser extent) on their context via the projects they undertake, evaluate, and scheme. The companion problem of “upwards conflation” (ibid., 4)  entailed by individualistic theories is that they are too simple by virtue of their anti-​ metaphysical attitude, leading to the substitution of positivistic methodology for (explicit) ontological commitment. While individualistic theories endorse a power of agency that is ontologically proximate with the reflexive deliberation agency1 upholds, the explicit “black box” behaviorism of positivism excludes reference to the process of reflexivity. They do so with variations on a muscular conception of a rational, autonomous decision-​making capacity that manifests in agents’ choices. Despite the attempt to remain ontologically neutral, methodological individualism, and its Humean underpinnings, smuggle in an ontology of the subject as agent that is simplified and quantifiable: the subject rendered as a “choosing machine.” By not addressing the implications that follow from the fact sociocultural agency is the necessary condition for manifest human agency, individualistic theories misconstrue the causes and effects of social forms. They regard social forms as epiphenomenal effects of aggregate individual behavior (usually either pathological or functional). They do not recognize how social forms provide the parameters for “rationality” and “autonomy” as characteristics of subject-​agents with respect to their structured positioning and identity within a social field. Far from epiphenomenal, the “causal power” of social forms provides the building blocks from which the concerns and projects (choices) of subject-​agents exercising their “causal power” construct their lives.

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The ontology of subjectivity 127

Critiquing reflexive deliberation Archer (2007, 21–​22) attends to the problems raised by the sociological concepts of “unacknowledged conditions of action” and “vested interests” for the DCR philosophical account of subjectivity and agency. In addition, and paramount to the notion of reflexive deliberation, is the issue of “discursive penetration,” viz., the ability of subjects to account in explicit terms the origin, nature, and rationale of their beliefs and desires and how and why social forms have either enabled or constrained their projects (ibid.). Are there a priori barriers to discursive penetration, hiding the origin and effects of unconscious beliefs and desires and other forms of social determinations that lock subjects into patterns of thought and behavior? Or is there in principle no barrier, and limits are self-​set by what is practical and useful? For the discursive articulation of a constraint or determinant—​if found self-​defeating—​is the first step to removing its deleterious effect, concerning psychodynamics of subjectivity and the free pursuit of projects. Agents can think through, verbalize, write down, and analyze the conditional parameters of their lives. The primary objection to DCR ontology of subjectivity holds that objective social properties do not merely enable or constrain people’s projects, but have a much more profound power to shape who subjects are and what they want.20 The logic of unacknowledged conditions of action has “radical” and “realist” declinations. For the realist, unacknowledged conditions are the unknown or opaque enablements and constraints that help or hinder agents’ projects, conditions taken for granted or assumed to be “just the way it is”—​for example, the ways race/​class/​gender influence job prospects, bank loans, possibilities for marriage, etc.—​which subject-​agents may or may not appreciate. In the radical view, I take the concept of “unacknowledged conditions of action” to fall under Archer’s concept-​neologism of “society’s being,” namely, a description of social theories granting ontological priority to society that “present…all our human properties and powers, beyond those stemming from our biological constitution, as derivative from society” (2003, 97). And most important to this conception is the unawareness of subjects of themselves, as an effect of social powers. This “radical” or “anti-​humanist” form of social determinism posits an ontological constitutive power, determining subjects’ beliefs and desires and pushing subjects toward various outcomes. In the radical view, a “subjectivity” of beliefs, desires, and interests is an effect of “interpellation” within a sociocultural “lifeworld” of subject positions which mold and fill the outlook of the subject, such that facets of subjectivity (the subject’s motivations, desired ends, ethical horizon, worldview) are derived from the sociocultural sphere. Located at a more basic determination than the psychological and experiential idiosyncrasies of the individual, whatever “external” plane of reality is posited as holding ontological (and hence logical) priority to subjectivity (hermeneutic language games, class position in capitalist societies, heteronormativity, and so forth) speaks through the subject via its constitutive power.

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128  The ontology of subjectivity The radical view, of which Heidegger is a chief architect, is that unacknowledged conditions operate by prepositioning the stance of an agent’s first-​person perspective. In John Searle’s critique of Heidegger and other phenomenologists (2008, 124), “Dasein,” like (neo-​)Kantian forms of “transcendental consciousness,” is a version of the general problem of “phenomenological operators.” Searle argues theories of this sort instance “perspectivalism,” which claims that for human beings encountering a world of objective things, “the point of view from which the phenomena are described becomes part of the ontology of the phenomena” such that “reality exists but only from a perspective” (ibid., 128, 124). In this way, an agent’s subjectivity is “always already” given to them because subject and object are collapsed into one another. Despite the confusing nomenclature, for Heidegger, “ontology,” viz., knowledge of being—​given by conscious speculation about the world—​has been prefigured by “pre-​ontological features” of Dasein (or habitus à la Bourdieu, and power-​discourse truth regimes à la Foucault) relative to sociohistorical context. Conscious reflection (on human nature, on relations to the world—​on concerns, projects, and social forms) is preordained by a context of cultural categories and logics that are not only unacknowledged, but unconscious. Heidegger’s idealism gives ontological priority to the phenomenal world (ready-​at-​hand) over the phenomenon’s objective basis (present-​at-​hand). In other words, a human-​ orientated “essence” precedes all objective “existence,” such that ontological claims axiomatically have a stance or perspective built into their constitution. For Heidegger, a mood, attitude, or grid of intelligibility presupposes reality, giving reality its value, aesthetics, meaning, and practical use:  ontology is always perspectival. The unacknowledged conditions of action in the radical view are more powerful and profound than unknown enablements and constraints that emerge from social structures. Unacknowledged conditions of Dasein emerge as a causal power that affects what subjects make, do, and say by orientating their praxis in ways “ ‘always already’…meaningful” (ibid., 119, quoting Heidegger 1962, 101). For Heidegger, subject and object are elided: whatever agents might think about themselves, others around them, and the world around—​their “being in the world”—​reflects the concealed effects of Dasein. For DCR, human existence emerges from lower strata and holds irreducible causal powers; in the radical, idealist, and mistaken view, human consciousness (as “actual”) is intertwined with, and co-​constitutive of, all ontological strata of reality (as the “real”). There is no objective reality because human subjects with geohistorical and sociocultural emplaced subjectivities participate in its production. There are two problems with “perspectivalism.” The first is that, like all anti-​humanist positions, it a prime example of the “epistemic fallacy,” discussed in chapter two, whereby questions of “being” are collapsed into a “knowledge of being.” In Heidegger’s case, he mistakenly inverts the constellational relationship between meaning, human-​orientated use value, and identity (revolving around the transitive domain of science

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The ontology of subjectivity 129 and epistemology) and the objective conditions of existence (intransitive domain of emergent, stratified reality). Heidegger argues the objective conditions are embedded in the transitive domain. On the contrary, knowledge emerges from being; being does not emerge from knowledge. The reason for this error stems from the problem Searle (ibid., 116)  identifies as the “phenomenological illusion.” The illusion is propagated because the phenomenological experience of the world through the five senses and cognition of meanings, values, etc. is generally experientially prior to ontological considerations. As Searle notes, when using a hammer or surveying a stand of trees, people do not consider the molecular structure and other ontological features of the constitution of the objects as material entities. However, it is an “illusion” to consequently transpose the fact of “phenomenological priority” of experience into a claim for ontological priority in terms of causal responsibility. This is not to lessen the significance of the fact people bring meanings, “moods,” and interpretations to the world they live in. The problem is regarding phenomenology as ontology, which has the further illogical consequence of flattening reality and failing to account for real ontological differences. The most significant, in Searle’s terms, conflates observer-​relative reality and observer-​independent reality as an undifferentiated phenomenal reality which negates the foundational ontological difference between both—​for example, between a “tree” (observer-​independent ontology) and a “hammer” (observer-​relative ontology). In Heideggerese, both are equated pre-​ontologically by a common holistic background, informed by the Dasein of Western instrumental rationality, as a “machine for making BTUs” and a “machine for hammering.” Just because the “real” intransitive and transfactual causal mechanisms and structures are not usually phenomenologically available, it does not follow that things in the world derive their existence from unconscious, unacknowledged, and received cultural categories operating as a grid of experiential intelligibility. Searle points out the supposed power of Dasein in creating the world ends in absolute relativism:  the Dasein of the ancient Greeks reveals Zeus; the Dasein of the scientific stance reveals quarks; the Dasein of children reveals Santa Claus; the Dasein of the mathematical stance reveals 2+2=4. According to the logic of Dasein, all are equally true and equally false; gods, quarks, Santa Claus, and math are only “true” relative to the Dasein by which they are revealed, and if the Dasein disappears from history, so do their “truths” (ibid., 129–​30). The second problem is an empirical point. As Archer argues, if conditions shaping subjectivity within a society “motivate [agents] towards various courses of action…by moulding it in a particular manner,…such causal influences should be exerted in blanket form on all people,” with the effect that: There would be no difference in response, according to their subjective reception by different individual agents (or groups of agents) if all were totally unaware of them. Only a uniform response from the population

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130  The ontology of subjectivity in question would justify ignoring their personal subjectivity, on the grounds that this has been externally shaped. (2007, 21) Of great significance, the lockstep of totalized “uniform responses” is uncommon if not nonexistent, and this fact requires consideration of how and why agents are making variegated responses to a shared social reality.21 Because projects of agents activate the causal power of objective social forms, and projects are intertwined with agential deliberation, it is the realist axiom that “reflexive variability” explains “differences of response under the same unacknowledged conditions” (ibid., 22). In principle, for most individuals, given the complexities and contingencies of human existence, it should come as no surprise that many if not all actions have unacknowledged conditions related to geohistorical and social position that enable (or constrain) the agent.22 Realists thus can accept the potentiality of unacknowledged conditions of action (and unintended consequences) without jeopardizing the ontological value of reflexive deliberation in relation to projects. The question becomes whether or not and to what extent a subject can increase their “acknowledgment of conditions,” through reflection, research, and/​or experience. There is no doubt ideology and life expectations tied to social position (across class, race, region, etc.) have power to influence the destiny and behavior of agents. Reproduction is not a passive activity, however, and people are not ciphers for objective forces operating “mechanistically” from the sociocultural level to individual agential behavior. Along the same line, Archer notes (ibid., 27) the power of ideology to shape and control a body politic is only “an attempt” to influence people’s beliefs and actions; it does not have power other than to the extent people believe in the ideological program, a choice based out of personal subjectivity. Social class reproduction, gender, occupational choices, and consumption patterns—​whatever the domain of research investigation—​require consideration of the reflexive capacity of agents involved. Moreover, even if subjects respond to objective conditions in a similar fashion, taking on common projects and creating statistical regularities discernible from a “third-​person perspective,” a variety of motivations arising from different matrices of concerns and deliberations can end up in the same place. A complementary issue to the problem of “unacknowledged conditions” is that of “vested interests.” Archer notes that “structural properties, such as vested interests,…can motivate by encouraging and discouraging people from particular courses of action” (ibid., 22). As it is, members of a society are distributed across a system of sociocultural forms of agency and identity. The first-​person perspective given by the identities of various agency2 positions are imbued with vested interests, which emerge as social properties, not necessarily “bundled” to specific agency3 roles (Archer 2003, 286). According to the Merriam-​Webster dictionary (n.d.), the definition of the term “vested interest” denotes a “personal or private reason for wanting something to

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The ontology of subjectivity 131 be done or to happen.” In Archer’s use of the term, the meaning of vested interest is expanded beyond purely “private” and “selfish” dimensions. In her usage, vested interests include social properties generated from desired social outcomes that transcend individual agents1: wage earners have a vested interest in job security, job benefits, and wage increases. Families have a vested interest in good schools, safe streets, and affordable housing. Social minorities have a vested interest in group cohesion and the prevention of marginalization by social majorities. Part and parcel of the reasons that dispose agents to various outcomes, vested interests map onto unequal distributions of power, money, resources, status, etc., which generates a motivation to either “hold on” or “seize more.” Moreover, vested interests run concurrent with social-​structural positions marked by sets of particular rights, duties, and obligations that give rise to a positional subjectivity marked by a particular “stance” and motivation:  the prosecuting attorney is interested in winning cases against defendants; the banker is interested in finding the best return on investment; the academic is interested in winning grant money to further their research. Vested interests are personally defined and “ride along” with the structurally derived position. In the above examples, for instance, the attorney seeks to bolster their future political aspirations as “tough on crime”; the banker wants to buy a villa in southern France in addition to their Manhattan condo; the academic hopes to pay next month’s rent. Vested interests, in addition, can also diverge from the social-​positional functioning. As an illustration, Bhaskar notes for many types of occupational labor, e.g., for “garbage collectors,” collecting trash and fulfilling a social function, the personal motivation for the job (such as for money, health care, and pension plans) is likely to have a tenuous connection to the successful collection (as a function) of trash (1998, 36). On the other hand, participants volunteering for a Saturday morning trash pickup at a local park are motivated by such interests as civic duty, commitment to the well-​being of green spaces, participating in a like-​minded community action, and so on. While the functions of picking up trash are nearly the same for the sanitary engineer and weekend volunteer, only for the latter do the interest of collecting trash as function and the vested interest of “do-​goodism” overlap. While the concept of vested interests is a useful tool to analyze sociological features of subjectivity, the potential problem with the concept is twofold. The first problem is that of sociological reduction: by identifying subjectivity solely in terms of vested interests, the agent is defined by nothing more than the set of interests they pursue, leading to stereotypes, hasty generalizations, and “thin descriptions” of social life. The second, deeper problem is that in order for a vested interest to be taken up by an agent, the interest must “first to be found good by a person before they can influence the projects she entertains” (Archer 2007, 22). The pursuit of vested interests therefore begs the question of why a subject holds the “concern” manifesting the interest, whose answer cannot be given a priori based on a sociological profile or other objective identification of the agent.

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132  The ontology of subjectivity The insight motivating an analysis of the role unacknowledged conditions of action and vested interests play in the life of agents is that people often—​ if not always—​lack some degree of discursive penetration into the social conditions that enable their projects, and into the cultural values informing their concerns. This observation, however, is beside the point. Subject-​agents need not have significant discursive penetration of properties, which otherwise would render the concept of “unacknowledged conditions” meaningless (ibid.). It does not follow that a subject’s failure to have discursive penetration into their projects entails they are dogmatically following a script, like an actor repeating lines they did not write. These conditions need only “to shape her motivation” by “shap[ing] her circumstances” by facilitating or hampering the achievement of goals and rewards of particular vested interests (ibid.). Without recourse to an ontologically grounded theory of subjectivity, the tendency for social scientists to replace the “subjective” with “objective” features is understandable, reinforced by the requirement to provide an objective, third-​person account of the social event or process under consideration. Following Archer’s example (ibid.), consider the relative ease with which Western anthropologists travel to non-​Western countries for fieldwork. How frequently is it the case the people anthropologists study do not have the legal and/​or financial ability to come to Western metropoles? The anthropologist need not (though they should) have discursive penetration into the background of neocolonialism and asymmetrical international relations that enable them and constrain their local informants. All the anthropologist has to acknowledge is the possibility of conducting fieldwork (the rite of passage for anthropology) and the eventual academic credentials and economic advantages that usually accrue to a PhD.23 As such, their vested interests in an academic career and its benefits flow from these conditioned possibilities, which thus provide the grounds of their motivation.

Conclusion (in four parts) (1) For social scientists and theoreticians, a significant implication of reflexivity as the mechanism of mediation between agents and structure is that it bars a priori modeling of predicted outcomes.24 Within social life, while statistical regularities and trends are ever present, there are no Humean constant conjunctions, no deterministic “social laws” operating behind, above, or underneath human behaviors. Yet, the quest for constant conjunctions remains the gold standard of the physical sciences informed by positivism, and the envy of many social scientists and theoreticians. General tendencies and empirical regularities do form—​e.g., in the United States, white men tend to vote Republican and white women Democratic—​but no social science (including economics!) will ever devise a model of human being able to predict an individual’s future behavior. Otherwise, in ontological terms, either subjects or objects (depending on the theory) would be seen as having inherent ontological priority and causal power over the other, and hence as instances of

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The ontology of subjectivity 133 determined conjunctions. Empirically significant trends of behavior can be tied to other empirically derived social factors, such as socioeconomic status), gender and racial categories, political party affiliation, and so on. The point, however, is that the end result of individual behavior garnering “trends of behavior” fails to capture the multiplicity of motivations, attitudes, concerns, and conditions, all of which manifest in the reason for the behavior, being its cause. Two people performing the same behavior can have different reasons for doing so. Positivist methodologies cannot penetrate behavior to discover the social forms, process of reasoning, and psychodynamics actually in operation that lead subjects to choose both the projects they seek to complete and their response to structural conditions so embedded. This is the explanation for “the universal absence of similar responses in situations that are objectively similar,” which suggests an indeterminacy and realm of freedom in the ontology of the subject, providing an open space of deliberation (Archer 2010a, 10). In other words, statistically significant, “etic” trends, derived from a posteriori observation, have no explanatory value per se toward elucidating subjective, “emic” reasoning, on the basis of which subject-​agents determine their projects.25 Archer (2007, 23) argues that eliding subjectivity in the name of objectivity, post facto empiricist generalizations such as “the greater the cost of a project, the less likely are people to entertain it [is] not only…no explanation whatsoever,… but also far from eliminating subjectivity, it relies on a banal and highly dubious form of it.” The tendency of social theorists (including some realists, Archer notes) to rely on reductionist, heuristic, and/​or default models of subjectivity, such as “vested interests,” “objective interests,” “rational choice theory,” failed to capture the complexity and variety of emergent subjectivity (ibid., 23). Even social theorists who have expressly grappled with the nature of subjectivity and the agent-​structure problem, such as Pierre Bourdieu (a proponent of what Archer terms “elisionism” and to be discussed in greater detail in chapter six), were “often guilty of endorsing an empty formalism about subjectivity such that people's positions (‘semi-​consciously’ and ‘quasi-​ automatically’) engendered dispositions to reproduce their positions” (ibid.). Only an ontologically justified concept of subjectivity that foregrounds reflexivity in relation to the execution of projects does justice to actually existing people and their interpretations, choices, and outlook in life. Furthermore, there are ethical and related political issues of a potential ideological obfuscation behind simplified theories of subjectivity. By imparting a universal desire structure such as rational choice instrumentalism as the basic constitution of human subjectivity, the effect is to naturalize monadic individualism, competition, and desire maximization as inherent qualities of human agents. In other words, what are cultural values that might be politicized, negotiated, or contested can become unconscious or tacit values animating social, political, and economic theories as they inform public policies and our historically situated consciousness. Mistakes, mystification, and errors are causally efficacious, despite their lack of a referent, as they are incorporated into reasons for actions. Universal reductionist theories

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134  The ontology of subjectivity also artificially equalize the subjectivity of differentially located agents within a social field, thus depoliticizing social differences. By effacing the first-​person experience of deliberation over aspirations and limitations of existence—​ compromises, failures, and consequences of past actions—​reductionist theories “overwrite” the processes of socialization and the multitude of goals, experiences, and values that form subjects’ major concerns in life. Despite the absence of Humean constant conjunctions in the social world, there are obvious signs of causal powers in operation, of social ontological emergence, of cause-​and-​effect processes in all instances of both social stasis and transformative events. People constantly do things. The problem of why they do what they do is at stake. From the fact the social world consists of irreducible subjects and objects and the relations between the two, “this process necessarily involves the interplay between two different kinds of causal powers” (Archer 2007, 18). Moreover, if the subjective and objective have powers to affect one another, the two powers can countervail one another. Agents can override structural features of their milieus, often at great odds; structures can constrain agents, sometimes with iron determination; mostly, they cohabitate in quietude. To return to the question of “why people are doing what they do” requires a return to an examination of subjectivity and the social forms that shape its first-​person perspective. (2) The conception of a subject-​agent within the DCR world view avoids two opposite but flawed conceptions. The first are theories positing the subject as ontologically independent of their sociocultural context. In this conception, essential features of the agent-​subject are self-​caused and held without causal reference to social forms. It is expressed, for example, in the cultural formation known as “rugged individualism,” associated with the political viewpoint of libertarianism found in the western United States (and the Alaskan ideology of “every (wo)man for her/​himself ” of Sarah Palin). The second are versions of ontological structuralism, prevalent in much contemporary anti-​ humanist social theory, which view the subject as a product of (as caused by) language, ideology, and/​or social interpellation. In this conception, subjects are only tokens of social, cultural, and geohistorical positions, formations, emplacements, and/​or powers. The subject’s subjectivity is “particular” analytically only in reference to other subjects’ token subjectivity, usually arranged by hierarchies of social power (class, race, gender, etc.). DCR overcomes the antithesis between these two conceptions by incorporating the formal truth of both ontologies, in terms of causality, without their reductionism:  both agents and structures have causal powers and consequently are compelled to interlock. The outcome of the interplay of agents and structures is history. In the DCR model of subject-​agency I  am outlining, a central premise developed in chapter three concerns the “gap” operating in the structure of consciousness, which underlies the capacity for reflexivity as agential power in relation to the reproduction or transformation of social forms. The gap is between the “aboutness of consciousness” (that the subjective always has some

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The ontology of subjectivity 135 object precisely as its “subject”: thoughts, perceptions, imaginations, beliefs, feelings, etc.) and the “X” position of the capacity to roam intentional states, grounded in the primitive ability to traverse spatial and temporal dimensions of conscious experience. The “X” site, in Searle’s account, is the formal “self,” around which personal narratives, identities, and life experiences consolidate, and which subjects, for better or for worse, take to be “themselves.” The gap ensures some bare minimum level of a non-​reducible and non-​determined reflective capacity, in the teeth of the determinations, institutions, and cultural codes of the geohistorical context within which subject-​agents are born. This is not to say subjects always ascertain the gap (the problem of “self-​ deception,” also developed in chapter three and an issue addressed again in chapter five) and fail to reflect on myriad possibilities for sociocultural determination, whose effects are naturalized by virtue of folk theories or religious, pseudoscientific, and “common sense” justifications. The sociocultural context within which subjects are born is in many ways totalizing. An analogy is the subjects’ relation to their language community of upbringing, of their “native tongue.” Subjects “feel” this language as the natural mode of self-​ expression. Likewise, how subjects feel about their gender, sexuality, social stature, the rightness and wrongness of beliefs, desires, and behaviors, and so forth, becomes shaped, contextualized, and determined by ideological systems, institutional realities, and cultural logics subjugating the subject in a hair shirt of moral and judgmental imperatives. The “self,” nonetheless, is not fully determined by this matrix; we are not a Foucauldian body fully inscribed by culture and code through discipline and punishment. While subjects are dependent on sociocultural and occupational conduits of agency23 for the actualization of human agency1, subjects are capable in principle of reflecting upon and accepting or negating influences and forces as “the given” in their life. Moreover, in light of the relative autonomy of reflexivity subject-​agents enjoy, and granted such autonomy is operating in a sociocultural context subjects have neither chosen nor built, subjects are responsible for their decisions, judgments, and actions. As I will argue in the next chapter, subjects are responsible even when the concerns, values, and ideals that inform decisions and actions exert their power from preconscious or subconscious levels. (3) Implicit in the argument for reflexivity as the fount of human agency is its identification as an inherent and universal capacity of all human beings. As stated above, Wight (2006, 211) argues that “a corollary of the argument for the ‘freedom of subjectivity’ ” is the revitalization of the “passé and unfashionable” notion of “species being.” When conceptualizing the nature and powers of all human beings, it is necessary to make claims at the pre-​social level, viz., as capacities of homo sapiens as an animal in their own right. The species being of human being is composed of characteristics identified by the scientific order of its speciation, such as general attributes of its class, mammalia, and order, primates (live births, opposing thumbs, certain cognitive

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136  The ontology of subjectivity abilities) and specific attributes of its genus, homo, and subspecies, sapiens sapiens (such as proficient bipedalism, tool culture, symbolically mediated intersubjectivity via language).26 Wight (ibid.) makes four valuable points in regard to human species being. First, declaring objective features of the human species being means “we are talking about the human animal since the characteristic capacities of homo sapiens cannot be reduced to society, even if they can only be exercised within it.” Second, human beings, who rely on enculturation as a necessary condition of existence, “must have a particular physical constitution for them to be consistently socially influenced, such as when learning a language, arithmetic or tool making.” Third, “even in those cases where the biological is, in almost every instance, socially mediated, this does not mean that the mediated is not biological nor that the physical becomes epiphenomenal” (ibid., paraphrasing Sayer 1992, 121). This latter point is important, because it covers in parallel Archer’s “three orders of natural reality,” discussed above, and reflexivity as grounded in human species being but only manifested through social forms. This point also confronts constructionist/​idealist ontologies which collapse “reality” into cultural constructs, floating signifiers, and/​or discursive regimes with the effect that the “physical” is a secondary phenomenon that is, in the inverted logic of idealist accounts, “caused” (circumscribed, foregrounded, classified, ordered) by the mental event/​framework. Fourth, Wight argues there is a powerful ethico-​political consequence from identifying a universal concept of species being, as it “allows us to determine whether social conditions are dehumanizing or not” (ibid.). This raises a philosophical question over the criteria for a judgment of conditions considered “dehumanizing.” Without a concept defining what is “human” it is impossible axiomatically to derive what conditions are “dehuman”; otherwise, as Wight notes, “any and all political arrangements can be justified” (ibid.). In the social-​constructionist view, there are no “false” beliefs about the definition of human being, only differences of belief relative to a sociocultural milieu. However, such epistemic relativity necessarily slides into ethical relativity by its perspectivalism, dicing humankind into incommensurable and self-​referential chunks of culture. Only with a concept of species being defined in terms of a pre-​social “nature,” with attendant capacities and needs, can sociohistorical instances of human subjugation by other agents and institutions be identified, condemned, and rectified, whether slavery, gulags, concentration camps, or other forms of general degradation, exploitation, and repression. With an objective and grounded concept of human species being in place centered on reflexivity, the flip side is the objective forms of a sociocultural milieu. It follows from the relatively independent existence of social positions associated with agency2 and agency3 that their relative endurance warrants social-​theoretical/​scientific investigation and critique. While human sociality, enabled by symbolic exchange, grounded in language, is reasonably an outcome of homo sapiens sapiens speciation (humans who knows that they know?), geohistorical instances of all sociocultural systems are undetermined. In other

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The ontology of subjectivity 137 words, while human sociality is determined (as a necessity for human survival and continuation), what form it takes is contingent, however much fear such existential openness invigorates. On the one hand, whether considered individually or relatively, existent sociocultural systems are neither derived from some sort of preordained “Great Chain of Being” nor the outcome of human genetic coding processed through a Darwinian cull. On the other hand, social systems are not a free-​for-​all play of surfaces, self-​artificing in open spaces, or only referenced by signifiers without signifieds. And on another hand, in no way should the powers of reflexive deliberation entail radical freedom for the agent “to do what they please” or “get what they desire.” This error furnishes the core principle in various ideological guises (“the limitation is in you!”) such as New Age idealism and the cult of “positive thinking” (for the latter, cf. Ehrenreich 2009). Conversely, a central argument of this chapter is that any “freedom” or indeterminacy in the heart of the subject is tempered by structural constraints, whose effects cannot be wished away, ignored, or depoliticized with sufficient strength of “mind over matter” and the right self-​ help book. Agential reflexivity mediates structural and cultural conditions of what is and is not possible, but also what could be and ought to be possible, and these conditions are objective, intransitive aspects of any social reality. And consequently, in principle, these conditions can be critiqued, politicized, and transformed. While reflexivity is a chief feature of the human species being, it is also true that the sociocultural dimensions are equally if not more significant for understanding any geohistorical instance of this being, forever weighing heavily on the human soul. (4) In the final section of this conclusion, I  want to begin transitioning to chapter five, “The subject of psychoanalysis,” with several remarks meant to link both chapters. While elucidating the ontology of the subject in relation to reflexivity, concerns, projects, practices, and agential modalities’ human, sociocultural, and occupational forms, the focus has been on the relation between agency and structure. The level of analysis has been sociological, and the underpinning philosophical. In service to the ideal of developing a unified social theory, nonetheless, one level of human species being with which DCR has not engaged to the extent possible is the nature and power of subconscious intentional states and the theoretical tradition of psychoanalytic theory seeking to understand and ameliorate their negative effects. This theoretical absence is not because DCR social theory precludes incorporating the subconscious, but turns on pragmatic considerations which are mostly a function of academic disciplinary boundaries and the time required to study a new discipline, leading to difficulties with transdisciplinary research programs. The potential limitation to the value of psychoanalytical theory to social theory arises in its form as an “applied science” to subject-​agents individually on a “case-​by-​case” basis. However, I hope to show that by bringing together psychoanalytic theories of the subject and the ontology of the subject with

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138  The ontology of subjectivity social-​theoretical analysis of objective social forms, it becomes possible to illuminate the complexities and obscurities of a socialized human being. In doing so, I provide a “first impression” of the value of psychoanalytical theory to support and integrate with DCR social theory. The basic task therefore is to connect the DCR “philosophy of the subject” to those features of subjectivity that are “intimate and internal,” such as aspects of subjects’ identity (gender, sexuality, class, etc.) and psychodynamic dispositions (neurosis, anxiety, personality disorders, etc.) as these features manifest in patterned relational stances subjects take toward themselves, others, and the world. Psychoanalytical theory enriches social theory in terms of understanding subjectivity because mediation of social forms at the moment of reflexivity is also a psychodynamic mediation. On the grounds that “projects” manifest “concerns,” the nature and origin of a subject’s concerns, as mentioned above, are of profound “concern.” Though the semantic homology is not perfect, consider subjects’ concerns as “beliefs” and projects as “desires.” This transposition of terms is the connecting link between Archer-​ DCR and both Lacanian and existential psychoanalytic theory, explored in the next chapter. Inquiry into the origin and nature of beliefs and desires, especially when they are toxic and self-​defeating, is the cardinal virtue of psychoanalytical theory and its raison d’être. And to be slightly glib, while the world makes us crazy, it is my “belief ” this crazy world is an effect of unsound beliefs and mercenary desires.

Notes 1 For this section I  am drawing extensively from Margaret Archer’s essay, “The Ontological Status of Subjectivity” (2007). I  think this essay is pivotal to integrating psychoanalytical theory (chapter five) and DCR social theory, which can only be successfully accomplished at the level of ontology. 2 DCR and Searle argue against a third possible reduction—​to the social, whether the Lacanian reduction to language, or the social constructionist reduction of consciousness to socially inscribed subject positions, or an ontological mediator like Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, an argument I will address later in this chapter. 3 To get ahead a bit of arguments provided later in this chapter, Archer’s point speaks to the goal of ontological structuralist accounts of the subject, a supposed scientificity enabling the provision of a “third-​person” account of the subject, usually in terms of specific desire structures and/​or vested interests formed positionally in a social field. Reducing the subject to social structure without accounting for agential powers is an instance of the fallacy of the “primacy of the universal” Sartre argues against. For Sartre, existence precedes essence, and whether in terms of animal instincts, heavenly powers, or the determinative effects of “habitus,” the concrete specificity of the subject-​agent cannot be explained by the “universal”—​being creative as a child does not cause one to be an artist; being raised a bigot does not cause one to be a confirmed racist. Likewise, structural ontologies make the post hoc fallacy of assuming temporal sequence evidences causation because social structure, language, and/​or cultural systems precede individuals in their nativity. However, as I am arguing, following Archer, the mediatory capacity of reflexive deliberation

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The ontology of subjectivity 139 entails that the emergence of empirical regularities, trends, or “universals,” is ultimately a consequence of agential practice, the latter always a creative act of volition (whatever the reasons). Acts of volition can only be explained (or understood) in reference and in relation to the specificity of the subject-​agent. DCR social inquiry is not about identifying what “universals” are determining which subjects; rather, the question is always: why did the subject reproduce a “universal” rather than act volitionally otherwise, whether by domination or free choice? 4 “Discursive awareness” is the knowledge we hold about ourselves and can put into words. The Socratic method, in many ways, is the formal interrogation of beliefs, held by subjects but held non-​discursively, and frequently requiring a teacher-​as-​ midwife to be made known (and often terminated at birth when pitiful, misguided, or incoherent). I will be arguing in chapter five that in principle we (as subjects) can come to considerable “self-​knowledge.” There is, however, no a priori envelope for “inside” discursive awareness and a corresponding “outside” of unawareness. What is noticeable is that we hold many subconscious beliefs and desires, blind spots operating both at the individual level and collectively, usually with tragic consequences. For an illuminating example of collective “unawareness,” see Weiner (2007). 5 My discussion of Carruthers is tangential to his primary argument that a theory of self-​transparency is a universal and innate understanding of the “mind-​reading capacity” all human beings hold. He notes the notion of self-​transparency is deep-​ set within the Western philosophical tradition, naming Descartes, Kant, and Hume as typical purveyors of this belief within their respective philosophical systems. In this model, when a subject “reads their mind,” whether perceiving something or deciding on a course of action, etc., they simultaneously have a sense of the mind’s veracity (the “red car” is both a car and red) or as appropriate to their values (“I will buy a BMW rather than a Cadillac because I like its sophisticated European style”). Carruthers’ argument boils down to an evolutionary logic, in which subjects’ knowledge appears “transparent” to themselves to reduce the “computational load” on the brain in a complex social environment—​and hence advantageous. The theory of self-​transparency effectively blocks from conscious consideration (when operating) the apparently unapparent fact that the processes of thinking, deciding, seeing, and so on are actually always interpretations on some level. Why self-​transparency is a compelling belief may be because of the immediate collapse of the cognitive event and the content so cogitated, analogous to a “gut reaction” the subject takes as transparently true or good. A car honking at a bicycle rider might instantaneously engender a reaction of anger, aggression, fear, and/​or worry in the cyclist. It is not useful or pragmatic for subjects in normal, day-​to-​day experience to introspect analytically the nature of their interpretive access to their cognition. The conscious experience of our own cognition on whatever is in focus is severely limited moment to moment. I can accept that the necessary expedience of thinking demands that subjects must accept a mental event for what it is—​and seemingly “transparent.” The computational load of attempting to account for the origin and nature of a subject’s interpretive grid is no doubt heavy, but it should be stressed it also remains a possibility. I gather three crucial points from Carruthers’ analysis. First, he tags Freud and psychoanalytic theory, rightly, as a primary disrupter of the Western philosophical tendency to assume naively, and in turn theorize, self-​transparency as “obvious” before Freud’s recognition of how subconscious effects influence the subject’s conscious life. Second, though Carruthers does

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140  The ontology of subjectivity not make this link, the theory of self-​transparency, and the scientific and philosophical rejection of its tenets, is akin to the DCR recognition of the “ontic fallacy,” by which knowledge of being is unproblematically determined by being (such as “naive realism”). Third, which is a premise for my discussion in chapter five of the value of psychoanalysis, if a “mind-​reading capacity” is phenomenologically transparent but actually an interpretive operation, any movement toward enhanced self-​and social understanding, with an inherent teleology to transformation (as dialectic), will need precisely to “pierce the veil” of transparency, interfere with its automation, and elucidate the interpretive framework. 6 Looking forward to the next chapter, in Lacanian theoretical terms, I  think “concerns” are profoundly imbricated with the signifying chains composing the “fundamental fantasy.” The two basic algorithms that constitute the “fundamental project” and “fundamental relationship to the Other” operate unconsciously, inflecting the concerns we come to hold. 7 We should consider concerns both broadly and specifically. For instance, in the broad sense, a human “concern” that is seemingly ubiquitous and almost tautological, such as for “staying alive,” directs and becomes imbricated into many daily practices: fixing a meal, drinking water, going to a doctor, putting on a seatbelt, etc. The narrow sense, for example, would be a “concern” over the level of violence and crime in your neighborhood. Broad concerns manifest into narrow concerns, and the latter always tie into the former. 8 According to the British Humanist Association, a life stance is “a collective belief that attains a sufficient level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion, and importance and that relates the nature of life and the world to morality, values and/​or the way its believers should live.” The teachings of Aristotle, Jesus, Mohammad, Lao-​tsu, Buddha, and Nietzsche may be candidates for articulating original life stances. 9 This list is not exhaustive, and most projects (if not all) take their shape from several modes of conduct: a project could be at once ethical, spiritual, and economic, such as paying a yearly tithe. 10 I employ Bourdieu’s concept of habitus merely as an example that attempts to account for sociological regularities within a social field. I am in agreement with Archer’s criticism of the determinative and unconscious implications of habitus (2010b, 123–​43). 11 Let me make a caveat about desire. I am skeptical about theories of desire that claim there are none derived outside of the social, including thirst, hunger, social contact (e.g., experiments on chimpanzee babies wrested from their mothers, placed in cages, and left to cling to surrogate soft towels), and sexual drive (the be-​all and, often, end-​all desire, no?). I am willing to accept there are “basic need” desires, and the “feelings” of thirst, sex drive, etc. are biological in origin. But I also think such desires can only be expressed through socio-​symbolic frameworks of intelligibility as embedded within the “concrete universal” of the four planar model of social being, which inflects their expression. In research terms, it is uninteresting that people are hungry per se. What is interesting—​feast or famine—​are the conditions of hunger and the historically and culturally variegated ways people feed their hunger. 12 For example, over the past few decades the “transnational” practice of sending remittances home from workers in one country to support families in another has grown in significance. This labor practice became ubiquitous through advances in transportation and communication technologies. Hundreds of billions of

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The ontology of subjectivity 141 dollars flow from country to country in this recent phenomenon of global labor migration, with several countries’ economies (e.g., Haiti and Mexico) highly dependent on such income. Nonetheless, the “project” of supporting loved ones while working in another country requires a framework of legal, institutional, and technological components. At the same time, the possibility of sending remittances is conditioned by the continuing demand for labor abroad and by a lack of opportunity at home. The subject, deciding to work abroad, subsequently makes use of a preexisting, objective structure, which enables the practices derived from the project. Moreover, in the very act of practice of working abroad and sending remittances home, the subject reproduces the very structures required for this transnational practice. The subject requires transportation, communication, and financial services, and their consumption of these services reproduces those services for another round. Moreover, while Haitians, Indians, and Mexicans are enabled by congruent conditions to work abroad (even if nominally illegal), this transnational practice is denied to most North Koreans and Cubans, many of whom we suspect wish to travel and work abroad. At the same time, destination countries with advanced economies, such as Japan, European Union members, and the United States, have immigration laws and procedures to police their borders. Who may and who may not immigrate or enter as guest workers directly impinges on the conditions of possibility for people outside of these economies seeking income. 13 Archer describes the “three orders of natural reality” in slightly different ways. Archer (2003, 132) lists them as “natural, practical, and social” and later (2007, 28) as “nature, practice, and society.” I have taken the liberty of using the 2003 version for all references to the “three orders,” and linking “discursive” to the social order following her expansion of the concept as the “discursive social order” (2003, 133). As an aside, Archer’s “three orders” appear to me to have significant overlap with Bhaskar’s “four planar model” as the concrete universal of human existence, which, to repeat, involves relations to nature, intra-​and interpersonal relations, and relations to larger social-​structural and cultural formations. Whether “three orders” or “four sides” that are universal to “being in the world,” the point is that from each “side” emerge different types of concerns, projects, and practices in the face of the differences among the “objects”: body, praxis, other, and social forms. I will discuss Archer’s three orders in greater detail below. 14 A historical example: before the suffrage movement in the US and women gaining the right to vote and to run for political office, women who wanted to participate in politics would find themselves structurally constrained. However, the political and economic subordination of women is not a constraint unless women find themselves chafing under the dictates of this legal patriarchal circumscription, and actually desire otherwise. 15 I may become frustrated that my desire-​project to own a performance German automobile is thwarted by my low income. However understandable this frustration is, the financial constraint and consequent absence of a German car in my life (presumably for many others as well) is one example of countless constraints in life that would not grow into a “mass movement,” in this case, to overcome the structural barriers to possession of high-​end cars by the needy. 16 Slavoj Žižek points out, routinely, capitalist liberal democracies are largely characterized by ironic detachment born of cynicism, ennui, ineluctable structural reproduction, and an absence of viable alternative social forms.

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142  The ontology of subjectivity 17 It is worth raising the distinction between absolute constraints and relative constraints. The former are attempts to impose absolute control on a category of people (enforced hierarchies of gender, race, caste, etc.), a specific behavior (distribution of child porn, crimes against private property, etc.), or a mix of the two (the “illegality” of undocumented workers picking arugula in the US). The United States and Israel have built elaborate barriers on their borders with “problematic” others to inhibit crossing. Before women were granted the right to vote in many democracies, overt political activity by women was more or less nonexistent in virtue of enforced law. Relative constraints operate in more “open” social conditions, and are a function of differential holdings of resources and capacities when deemed “fairly” distributed, like wage income, meritocratic rewards, inherent talents, or good looks. 18 For instance, the history of breaking into traditionally segregated, white male spaces (country clubs, universities, social organizations, etc.) was motivated precisely by the recognition that vital and exclusive networking, business dealings, and political machinations, among other social activities of the “old boys’ clubs,” were injurious to the professional success of women and minorities. 19 My introduction to Archer’s stratified model of agency came from Colin Wight’s excellent summary of the model (2006, 211–​15). This book, incidentally, was my first contact with critical realist philosophy, and Wight’s overview was instrumental to my adoption of the critical realist worldview. 20 In this conceptualization, subjects’ motivations are deeply imbued by their identity and social situation (similar to the notion of the “big Other” and the objet petit a, to be discussed in chapter five). 21 For a penetrating critique of the “collective individual,” ignoring division and contradiction, as a univocal integrated bounded entity, see Handler (1988). While Handler focuses on the “nation” as collective individual (and agent), the same critique applies to other social “collectivities,” such as class, race, and gender. Wight (2006, 215–​25) makes a similar argument in relation to the “state-​as-​agent thesis.” 22 For example, members of upper and middle classes in advanced economies may not realize the relative ease of securing low-​interest bank loans for homes, cars, businesses, etc. compared to their poorer compatriots. Incidentally, while “unacknowledged conditions of action” pertain mostly to sociological analysis for good reason, I think the concept can easily cover ideational and psychoanalytical conditions of action as well, a point expressed by Žižek’s critique of “unknown knowns” (2004). 23 Let us not overstate the potential economic advantage of a PhD in sociocultural anthropology in these times (or any other academic discipline whose knowledge is difficult to monetize). 24 Just to note, a second implication is that the capacity for “reflexive deliberation” constellationally embeds “recursive practical materialism” as the two mechanisms that form the basis for the ontology of transformative agency. 25 This supports my thinking of the importance of bridging social theory and psychoanalytic theory: considering the formation of beliefs and desires through the wringer of socialization. 26 I am aware in particular of Foucault’s critique of taxonomy, such as in The Order of Things (1970), and general poststructuralist/​hard social-​constructionist views on the matter. I do not agree with these critiques of science and knowledge, and

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The ontology of subjectivity 143 I lean on thinkers such as Ian Hacking (2000), and Bhaskar’s argument against the epistemic fallacy, explored in chapter two, to defend the truth status of scientific knowledge as fallibilist, accretionary, and dependent on an observer-​independent reality.

Bibliography Archer, Margaret. 1995. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogentic Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, Margaret. 2003. Structure, Agency, and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, Margaret. 2007. “The Ontological Status of Subjectivity: The Missing Link Between Structure and Agency.” In Contributions to Social Ontology. Edited by Clive Lawson, John Latsis, and Nuno Martins. New York: Routledge. Archer, Margaret. 2010a. “Introduction:  The Reflexive Re-​turn.” In Conversations About Reflexivity. Edited by Margaret Archer. New York: Routledge. Archer, Margaret. 2010b. “Can Reflexivity and Habitus Work in Tandem?” In Conversations About Reflexivity. Edited by Margaret Archer. New York: Routledge. Bhaskar, Roy. 1998. The Possibility of Naturalism:  A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. New York: Routledge. Carruthers, Peter. 2008. “Cartesian Epistemology:  Is the Theory of the Self-​ Transparent Mind Innate?” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15(4): 28–​53. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2009. Bright-​Sided:  How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. New York: Metropolitan Books. Foucault, Michel. 1994 (1970). The Order of Things. New York: Vantage Books. Goffman, Erving. 1986 (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Hacking, Ian. 2000. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press. Handler, Richard. 1988. Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row. Sayer, Andrew. 1992. Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach. London: Routledge. Searle, John R. 2008. Philosophy for a New Century:  Selected Essays. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Solomon, Robert C. 1995. “Subjectivity.” In The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Edited by Ted Honderich. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1996. “Subaltern Talk: Interview with the Editors.” In The Spivak Reader. Edited by D. Landry and G. Maclean. London: Routledge. Merriam-​Webster. n.d. “Vested Interest.” Merriam-​Webster.com. Accessed February 18, 2016. www.merriam-​webster.com/​dictionary/​vested interest. Weiner, Tim. 2007. Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA. New York: Doubleday. Wight, Colin. 2006. Agents, Structures, and International Relations: Politics as Ontology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. “What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib.” In These Times, 21 May. inthesetimes.com/​article/​747/​what_​rumsfeld_​ doesn_​know_​that_​he_​knows_​about_​abu_​ghrai.

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5  The subject of psychoanalysis

Introduction The radical idealism of anti-​humanist and poststructuralist tendencies is marked by epistemic skepticism toward ontologizing the subject. On this course, Jacques Lacan as déconstructeur places the “subject” in a nexus of language and big Other ego ideals, which “$ubjects” unconsciously reproduce as neurotic ciphers of history and society.1 Lacking any epistemic vantage on the powers of interpellation, $ubjects are enjoined to “enjoy their symptom” and move on. Although the deconstruction of the subject and death of “Man” subverts obvious metaphysical conceits underlying the eternal soul, Cartesian ego, and the rationality of the autonomous individual (and the ideopolitical projects such metaphysics promotes), the apparent collapse of the subject as agent was too hastily proclaimed. Drawing primarily on Bruce Fink’s A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (1999), this chapter moors Lacanian psychoanalytical theory to a substantive ontology of the subject developed in existentialist psychotherapy and DCR. The basic logic of psychoanalysis as a human-​centered knowledge and practice bears this out. Lacan’s psychoanalytical framework, however grounded in a matrix of epistemological and ontological positions—​to wit, a theory of a “non-​subject”—​is simultaneously a mode of practical knowledge with a teleological thrust (which has ethical and political implications) to transform the analysand in the throes of psychopathological crisis. Consequently, Fink’s explication of the basic Lacanian corpus in terms of its clinical application (as opposed, for example, to a political and philosophical rendition, à la Žižek) has the effect of recasting ostensibly epistemic categories of the Lacanian framework into ontological capacities and powers, that is to say, of transforming Lacan’s idealism into a realist psychoanalytic framework. In order for Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory to be effective, to have bite in the lives of analysands, ontological commitments must be present and valid. For an analysand to improve their condition, I contend Lacan must rely on a theory of the subject with some intrinsic capacity for agency in relation to their social context and provide a general framework of this relationship.

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The subject of psychoanalysis 145

The speaking cure For Lacan, there is a “truth” of the universal psychological structure of the human subject and a corresponding theory of its internal constitution and intrinsic dynamism. Psychotherapy’s profundity arises from identifying the intimate mechanisms transmuting human biological embodiment through social-​symbolic processes. Among the human sciences, both in terms of theory and practice, psychotherapy most directly confronts the individual subject in all their specificities.2 For subjects—​each with a “truth” of desire and beliefs ensconced in the subconscious—​psychotherapy seeks to elucidate the constitution of their unconscious intentions, making them at first “knowable” and ultimately transformable as the endgame of the psychotherapeutic process. In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, a crucial disjunction and point of tension exists between what the subject actually says in the flow of their speech acts (what Lacan calls “the letter”) and what they intend to mean.3 The basic logic of intentionality of meaning is to represent to others (and perhaps most importantly to the self) what kind of person the subject would like to represent about themselves. According to Lacan, intentionality operates at the level of the conscious ego, which struggles to maintain symbolic hegemony over the received meaning to whomever the speech act is directed toward (including the self in internal speech acts). This may be in an immediate face-​to-​face encounter with the other(s) in speech, or dispersed and delayed such as in the textual forms of letters, blogs, books, and so forth. Whatever subjects intend to convey as meaningful by the ego is shaped by barriers constructed to achieve two interlocking facets of the subject’s ego.

Formation of the subconscious The first is to project and promulgate types of “self ” or categories of personhood. Subjects inhabit multiple sites of personhood and act according to their constitutive ethos. This self can vary greatly in relation to the social context, and is captured theoretically in terms of the “performanity” of gender, class, and other modes of identity (“I’m a tough guy, and my chains, tattoos, and haircut indicate I want to be hyper-​masculine and want you to recognize me as such”). The second is the inverse process of striving to suppress intentional states: the desires, thoughts, and feelings discordant with the categories of the self and ego ideals. The meanings people rehearse and deploy—​what they consciously attempt to represent—​simultaneously exclude and repress what does not fit their self-​image: sexual impulses considered “inappropriate,” feelings of inadequacy, and resistance to symbolic and bodily subordination (which often manifests in passive-​aggressive behavior in the face of power/​castration). Attempts at repression, however, inevitably fail because the meanings of conscious intentionality are routinely supplanted and subverted by the

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146  The subject of psychoanalysis subconscious. What people attempt to connote is not fully under control, and words and innuendos slip out in the act of denoting. Lacan gives priority to the unconscious over the ego as having the “final word” because of the polysemous nature of language. This is because ultimately the word (or “letter”) of what people say is attached to the “Real,” Lacan’s concept for what is unspoken, unknown, and unrepresented, while what people mean—​what is consciously intended to say—​is formed intersubjectively, within the symbolic sphere.4 The outpouring of the subconscious (what people really believe and desire) makes its way through slips of the tongue, fantasies, and the basic ways the subject relates to themselves, to others, and the world around. The subconscious is a heuristic concept, and as such fails the “criterion of perceptibility” (as does “gravity” as a force) as justification for existence. On the other hand, the categories and concepts developed in Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory are not rooted merely in a culturally contingent “episteme,” intertwining knowledge and power. While historical or cross-​cultural contexts indeed produce different forms of psychopathology, the subconsciousness—​ as an existent mechanism within a larger emergent structure of mind—​is justified. Effects of the subconscious in terms of the feelings, behaviors, and thoughts of the subject, to which no cause is consciously known initially, are the point of inference to the ontological validation of the subconscious. These effects are the product of the interrelated processes of repression and socialization, which, as Fink (1999, 77)  points out, are the cause of neurosis and the default psychodynamic of the universal subject.5 Lacan following Freud argues neurosis is inevitable because the routine mechanisms of socialization suppress a portion of all people’s drives and impress the particulars of their cultural upbringing, which in turn constitutes the basic structure and experiential “mouthfeel” of the subject’s consciousness. The process of repression, which begins in earnest when the child enters into language, is the complementary feature of the subject’s internalization of the Law (rules, ideals, ideologies, and culturally enshrined modes of identity), or what Lacan terms the “big Other.” Lacan’s famous dictum “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other” consequently prefigures the most powerful insight of Lacanian psychoanalysis: if the subject can “bring to light” and explicate the big Other’s discourse, and reach a point of consciously choosing or rejecting these discourses, the subject can begin overcoming their effects emanating from their subconscious. Consequently, the goal of psychoanalysis (or its ethical teleology) is for the analysand (and I think it is implicit in Lacanian theory this is a universal goal for all people) to confront their subconscious—​to “subjectify” the way their desires and beliefs have been shaped in terms of repression and ego ideals in relation to the big Other. While the ego is not master of its own house, it is the goal of psychotherapy to identify who is the “real” master of the discourses to which people prostrate their beliefs and desires and thus establish their subjectivity. The primary hurdle neurotics face is no longer blaming an “other” for their castration (parents, role models, one’s “betters,” and so forth), the

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The subject of psychoanalysis 147 classic instance of Sartrean “self-​deception.” In clinical practice, the first step is for the analysand to accept complete responsibility for their fate—​all past actions, decisions, and accidents—​whoever they have become, their inadequacies and powers, and reckon as theirs and theirs alone. The flip side to acting in self-​deception, nonetheless, is not easily satisfied. Fink notes (ibid., 55) that neurotics frequently do not know what they want—​ analysands “express uncertainty about their own wants, about the legitimacy of what they want, and even about wanting in general.” The problem arises because the content of their phantasmic projections of their fully realized self has been gifted from a big Other. Once the pleasure of fulfilling these directives wanes, desire becomes desire-​less, unfocused, and unassigned. For the neurotic, the therapeutic process is coming to terms with the objects of desire as designated worthy of emulation by parents, role models, and cultural ideals (“how do I look in skinny jeans?” the 12-year-​old pondered). Psychotherapy begins when analysands interrogate the actual content of their intentional states and utterances:  the who, what, and why of conscious enunciation in relation to the content of the (potentially) contradictory desires expressed out of the “return of the repressed,” manifesting in dreams, fantasies, daydreams, forgetfulness, and slips of the tongue. The goal is to come to terms with “who” is speaking inside the subject, what they say, and to loosen their power. Psychotherapy is successful when neurotics stop seeking from the Other coordinates of their desires, stop asking, “what does the big Other want me to do/​desire?” and begin asking, “what do I really desire?” No matter what the content of the subconscious, and however unconscious people are of the causal power of desires and beliefs emanating from the subconscious, it is axiomatic—​by denuding the big Other’s power, the resultant vacuum forces the subject to confront the latent possibilities of their existence, and hence assume greater control over their own structure of intentionality, of the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires that the subject experiences.6 This mode of reflexivity thus grounds a non-​neurotic subjectivity of human being, one that is responsive to the indeterminacy at the core of the subject, but also vigilant to the demands and restrictions placed on the subject in the socio-​symbolic field. To thus “act out” authentic desire (which, discussed below, Lacan locates in the course of the subject’s drive-​instincts), and to become the arbiter of one’s own Law, is the teleology of this higher-​ order “meta-​desire.” The power of the big Other, while condensed in master symbols such as God, Nation, Father, Party, and “Happy Individual,” nonetheless requires mediation in terms of the process of socialization and ultimately individual practice. The primary mechanism of mediation is Lacan’s concept of objet petit a. According to Lacan, the big Other circumscribes the desires of the subject, in effect constituting desire by fixating the subject on specific ends, the objet petit a (glossed in English as the “object cause of desire”). Built into the very symbolic value of objet petit a is the command to be desired, in this sense “causing” the desire of the subject to possess or attain its virtue.

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148  The subject of psychoanalysis Socially recognized markers of achievement (the A+, gold medal, PhD., and $), markers of distinction (the Cadillac, yacht, mansion, and tropical tan), and markers of identity (the national flag, the Christian cross, Air Jordans, and pickup trucks) are all examples which function as the objet petit a, imposed on the subject by the big Other’s demand. In this way objet petit a functions as a metonym, connecting the specificities of objet petit a to larger contexts (part and parcel) of ideologies, identities, and/​or lifestyles promoted by the big Other.7 In addition, the reproduction of the power imbued into objet petit a as a sociocultural process requires agents of mediation between the big Other and the subject, which Lacan terms “the subject supposed to know,” such as parents, psychotherapists, scientists, religious leaders, and cultural celebrities (ibid., 28–​29). “The subject supposed to know” typically has a combination of cultural capital, institutional authority, and esoteric knowledge that legitimates their position of authority. From these exalted positions, the subject supposed to know guarantees the truth of people’s beliefs and the prudence of their practices. Scientists validate big bang theory and evolution; the pope validates the existence of God for Catholics; the tomb of the unknown soldier, who sacrificed his life, validates the existence of the nation-​state; kings validate systems of hierarchical political power; and orthodox professors of economics validate laissez-​faire capitalism. For Lacan, the crisis of subjectivity for the neurotic revolves around a diminishing return of jouissance (the pleasure of fulfilling the directives of the “thou shalt”) from their embrace of an objet petit a. This crisis stems from an existential failure of neurotics to confront their core directive arising from their id-​drives (which have the last word in the Lacanian model) as bare impulses from within that constitute their “truth of being in the world.” Instead, the subject remains beholden to the big Other and unconscious of the effect of core beliefs (what Lacan terms the fundamental fantasy, to be discussed below) as they structure their desires, perceptions, and experiences, all in all locking them into the “Other as desire.” Neurotics avoid addressing their desire because confronting these tendencies leaves them existentially adrift and rudderless, left to confront the Real of their drives, a preferable subjective state Lacan terms subject as drive. In the clinical setting, a central Lacanian critique of therapy revolves around the problem that analysands are frequently neither motivated by a “genuine desire for change” to transcend their predicament, nor a “genuine desire for self-​knowledge” (ibid., 7). Rather, the base “will to seek therapy” stems from a crisis in which the analysand no longer has a will to act or live because their desire has diminished. The power of attraction emitting from the objet petit a recedes, leaving the subject floundering in crisis. In other words, the neurotic subject, acting in accordance to the dictates of the big Other, no longer garners pleasure (jouissance) from fulfilling their social destiny as ministered. For Lacan, subjects’ desire is for the experience of their desire—​people desire “desire”—​and when the objet petit a no longer props up or constitutes desire, subjects’ desire is left unfulfilled, sapping their libido, tempering their vigor.

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The subject of psychoanalysis 149 What the analysand merely seeks from therapy is for their symptom to be rejuvenated, providing all the jouissance it once did. And yet, this is neither possible nor desirable. To strive to be “well adjusted” to the dictates of sociocultural norms and institutions is no more than becoming detached from the contingency and latent possibilities of newfound existence-​in-​being, with the empty goal of becoming a “well-​tuned clockwork.” Meanwhile, in parallel form, the “psychotherapist of adjustment” is nothing more than an agent of traditional and/​or conventional ways of being in the world, bestowed by society and culture. The central psychic mechanism for Lacan thus is desire. Its causal power bears upon the $ubject by virtue of a crisis generated by desire’s unquenchable nature. Motivations by desire toward self-​actualization/​fulfillment, wholeness, “having it all” end in failure because the world cannot satisfy its demands. This contradiction arises from a fundamental conundrum at the heart of being, that an inherent “lack” forever motivates people to “end desire” by seeking wholeness and connections. Forms of attachment to “ethnic things,” religion, spiritualism, and mysticism operate as existential tonics, and yet are unfulfilling. Human desires are boundless and (not just hyperbolically) drive people crazy. Subjects seek to cut through the instability of the symbolic field, to find an Archimedean point that anchors meaning or a regime of Law to something Real to orientate their desires, to legitimate some and impose discipline on others. Idealizations, however, of the Native American “noble savage,” Taoist holism, orthodox adherence to the Talmud, lifestyles of the rich and famous, or the beauty and simplicity of pristine pre-​contact cultural others are fantasies, and typically commodified. Upper middle-​class Americans respond wholeheartedly to the cultural logic denoted in Pottery Barn and Williams-​Sonoma catalogs of life as cultured, intellectual, refined, happy, satisfied, and well connected with their self and social register—​their desires fulfilled. For Lacan, the potential for therapeutic success occurs when analysands gain insight into their psychic structure and take responsibility for their jouissance. This process involves the conscious subjectivization of hitherto latent and unknown powers “speaking” through the subject, whose ground point is the “fundamental fantasy,” and the subject’s ability to “traverse” the foundational fantastic narrative that constitutes the basic parameters of subjective experience. I take these fantasies to contain essential valuations and/​or narratives of self-​being as the set of relationships between self and self, self and other, and self and world, such as “I am inferior,” “I am special,” “I am feminine-​passive,” “I am one of God’s chosen,” and so forth. Fink locates the fundamental fantasy as a “position” or “stance” the subject has generated in relation “to the cause that has been responsible for so many of the subject’s choices and actions” (ibid., 70). Slavoj Žižek (2009) notes the fundamental fantasy forcibly decenters the subject even beyond the range of subconscious mechanisms—​ such as neurotic attachments to the big Other—​ rendering its subjectivization by ego almost impossible. The fantasy “constitutes and

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150  The subject of psychoanalysis guarantees the core of my being, [and] I can never consciously experience… and assume…the way things ‘really seem to me’.” Žižek (ibid.), however, seems to backtrack on the fundamental fantasy as foreclosed from view, writing, “for Lacan, the ultimate ethical task is that of the true awakening: not only from sleep, but from the spell of fantasy which controls us even more when we are awake.” On the latter view, traversing the fundamental fantasy, beyond neurosis, is the penultimate state before the utopic moment of the “authentic act.” In philosophical terms this “act” is the potentiality of the “Real in practice,” in which subjectivity collapses into “the Real,” Lacan’s term for the ontological foundation of the human species being as the set of human drives. The “authentic act” would be derived from a place outside the dictates of the big Other, beyond neurosis, arising from a spontaneous and creative impulse that would reflect something authentic, an almost mystical union of “self ” in relation to oneself. The question then arises:  without a big Other guiding the subject, structuring their desire and designating the objet petit a, from what basis does the non-​neurotic subject act beyond the basic biological imperatives, while still residing in a socio-​symbolic field? Lacan’s answer recenters the subject on their id, bringing the analysand to consider their instinct-​drives and allowing them to flourish without neurotic deflection. In principle, with the diminished power of the big Other, the subject is now able to explore the potentialities of his or her drives, pursue their vagaries, and finally “enjoy his or her enjoyment” (Fink 1999, 211). However, it does not follow, Fink argues, the successful completion of psychotherapy will turn the analysand into a “nonstop pleasure-​seeking machine,” mindlessly seeking pleasures of the libido (ibid., 210). Rather, it implies “that desire stops inhibiting the subject from obtaining satisfaction,” after which the neurotic can begin enjoying enjoyment without guilt (ibid.). Nor does it follow, I would contend, that when the subject finally grounds themselves in the “Real” of their drives, that is to say, their idiosyncratic subjectivity, it leads to some radical freedom of self-​generation and possibility. In principle such freedom is possible, but perhaps only for people akin to something like a Nietzschean “higher spiritual type,” having greater instinctual and/​or creative powers (or whatever special power this would entail to open new worlds of human existence). The vast majority of (former) neurotics remain more or less imbricated within possibilities of drive-​expression derived from their location within a sociocultural field. For the majority, “subject as drive” remains in tension with the “Other as desire.” The unstructured and polymorphous drive-​instincts of the individual are experienced and expressed wholly within a sociocultural context of potential objects of desire, whose ideals and valuations are well-​trodden pathways with typical markers of fame, fortune, identity, and behavioral imperatives. The sociocultural context holds intracultural variations depending on ethnic affiliation, class, and gender, and holds intercultural and sociohistorical variations as well, and thus delineates a more or less fixed set of the potential objets petits a for a given context of the $ubject’s desire. The ethical (and ultimately political) point, however, is

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The subject of psychoanalysis 151 Lacanian psychoanalysis enables the analysand to recognize the constitutive powers held above them, to begin objectifying their effects, and to pick and choose how to respond to their siren song.

The absent center of Lacan In principle, the goal of Lacanian psychoanalysis is to become aware of underlying psychodynamics through the process of subjectivizing the “unknown knowns”—​ values, ideals, identities—​ that constitute desires and beliefs. This process contains a fundamental and crucial distinction between two analytically separate moments of consciousness:  analysands’ states of pre-​ subjectivization and post-​subjectivization. It is the teleology toward the latter in which we find the fundamental Lacanian ethical program, which complies with general psychoanalytical and psychological forms of knowledge that are intrinsically concerned with transformation of consciousness as a therapy. As neurosis is the consequence of the enculturated psyche, and psychotherapy (however construed) a solution to its detrimental effects, it is consequently possible to contest the value of psychotherapy: why is it better to confront the big Other and mitigate the inevitable reduction of jouissance? Why is the conscious experience of secure self-​expression of human drives and quasi self-​sovereignty to decide upon one’s own Law better than neurotic misery and helplessness? What framework is available to evaluate this “new” meta-​ desire? Reports of successful psychotherapy, of individual transformation, of analysands finally “getting what they want” appear to be the justification, and I accept this as a reasonable supposition.8 This is not to say coming to terms with the objects of desire can be addressed and assuaged once and for all. Over the course of maturation toward death, even after successful therapy, subjects continue negotiating their relation to the beliefs, values, conventions, and symbols of the social field which they inhabit. The subject remains challenged to come to terms with their complicity in the maintenance of jouissance within the “received” structure of desire. The Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, and its explication of the relationship between the subject and the social field, provides a robust theory of how meanings and practices of the sociocultural field of existence become internalized at the level of the subconscious. The field asserts itself through its causal powers and determinations of social structure, ideological formations, and collective representations as they interlock with the subject’s historical positioning within technological epochs, ecological contexts, and geography, which provides a more or less fixed set of constraints and enabled powers. As Žižek has argued, the value of psychotherapy is not exhausted in its “traditional” application to individual subjects having crossed the threshold of psychopathology (however this threshold is delineated á la Foucault) with its clinical focus on mitigating various kinds of afflictions cross-​cutting interpersonal relations.9 On the contrary, at precisely the points of the fundamental fantasy, objet petit a, and big Other, the social field inflects subjectivity. In

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152  The subject of psychoanalysis other words, at their point of raison d’être, the subject’s desires are made manifest in practice, both as demands placed throughout the network of the subject’s interpersonal relations (friends, children, parents, authority figures, and so on) as well as how people “live out” in practice their interests, beliefs, ethico-​political commitments, and economic choices. Lacan thus uncovers central mechanisms of interpellation, bringing the subject into the doxa of the sociocultural. Nonetheless, Lacan’s “theory of the subject” contains an implicit lacuna, and, inverting for a moment Lacan’s concept of “subject as Real,” gives rise to the “Real as subject,” or in other words, the “agent.” The prospect of a sui generis and emergent causal power of human agency, I believe, must be granted as a precondition for the possibility of psychoanalysis as a coherent and meaningful therapeutic ethos toward the neurotic and their interpellation into the social field. Lacan posits only the $ubject as a symptom (empty signifier) of neurotic desires as they become situated—​bodily mediated—​in and through the subconscious, which in turn undergirds conscious experiences. Lacan’s “anti-​humanist” conception of the subject stems from his structural methodology, which was informed by the work of two prominent structuralists, Claude Lévi-​Strauss and Ferdinand de Saussure.10 While employing a structural methodology does not necessarily entail a commitment to ontological structuralism, Lacan’s “language-​first” ontology, as the ultimate point of reference for the subject and their subjectivity, commits him to a version of structural (ontological) determination. Nonetheless, it is problematic that, at the same time, Lacan holds out the possibility for individuals to “become better,” while not explicitly theorizing the means to do so (such as “reflexivity” or some other conception of “agency”). A more realist reading of Lacan, as I am proposing, rectifies the absence of agency in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory that appears to be latently assumed on some level. By supplementing Lacan’s ontological structuralism with complementary conceptualizations of agency, developed in existentialist psychotherapy and further grounded in the ontology of DCR, these three compatible theories (as I am claiming) round out a theory of the subject. The legitimacy of supplementing Lacanian theory is based on the apparent gap existing between the determinations of desires, big Others, and fantasies on the one hand, and a sui generis causal power of subject-​agent on the other, which Lacanians must suppose in order for psychotherapy to be a coherent and therapeutic enterprise. In Lacan’s theory, “subjectivity” is collapsed into language, guided by object-​causes of desire, and structured by discourses of the big Other to form the “subject of enunciation,” all in all, a fully deterministic structural ontology. But, from whence comes the impulse to therapy if so determined? And what powers does the ego hold, granting the subject some minimal awareness that desires, fantasies, and drives are happening to a subject upon which they themselves can reflect, form insights, and begin dissolving the scourge of neurosis? Furthermore, what are we to make of the fully analyzed subject: what is their new mode of subjectivity when they have

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The subject of psychoanalysis 153 gotten “Real?” When pushed, it appears the logic of Lacanian theory begins to devolve into incoherency: before analysis they are a neurotic cipher of the big Other derived from the cultural and social system, and “getting off ” from the pleasure the dictates of the other provides. After analysis, they attain a freedom of a non-​neurotic animal, reduced to bare minimum drives, instincts, and id, becoming a mindless desiring $ubject, unfettered by social norms, and enacting a purer expression in a $ubject’s “new” desire. This hyperbole notwithstanding, a basic contradiction remains: at the level of psychotherapeutic practice, Lacanian psychoanalysis requires some sort of agential power operating reflexively as a knower both of “whom” the sociocultural is effecting, and of “who” it is who feels the inner urge of these drives and can express them as non-​neurotic desires. Meanwhile, at the level of Lacanian psychoanalytical theory (informing the practice of therapy), agency is effaced by a commitment to structure as both a method—​determining what units of analysis are pertinent to such theory—​and a further metatheoretical claim that in terms of social ontology, only the big Other and the objet petit a have causal powers to form the subject out of the existing cultural oeuvre and interlocking social structure, or in other words, the only “agency” operating resides in the social and not the individual. Moreover, the therapeutic shift to “$ubject as drive” as biologically derived form of causal power (however justified or philosophically interesting, which I think are open questions) does not appear to be a theoretically complete basis for a “sounder” psyche.

Human agency in existence As Lacanian psychoanalytical theory subscribes to a structural ontology that effaces human agency, it locates the first movement of causal powers in the social-​symbolic context in which the subject is interpellated. Simultaneously, Lacanian theory ultimately smuggles in subject-​agency of some minimal power of reflexivity to monitor and alter behavior, sufficient at a minimum to pursue one’s “will to therapy.”11 Human agency must be grounded in ontological terms as a form of causal power, and consequently necessitates a realist defense of its existence. At the same time, this critique is metatheoretical in that it reframes Lacanian psychoanalytic theory using central categories of social ontological inquiry. In the immanent, materialist, and realist version I have developed in the three preceding chapters, the nature of agential and structural forms of causal power as irreducible and yet mutually constitutive in their interplay redresses the flaw with Lacan’s $ubject. Explicating basic powers of a subject as agent develops a transitive explanation and understanding of human existence and the social world without a reduction to either. As noted above, the virtue of Lacanian psychoanalytical theory is its explanatory power to model the process whereby social-​ structural determinations shape people’s lives at the subconscious level. Lacan identified and theorized these determinations as the big Other, the objet petit a, and

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154  The subject of psychoanalysis the fundamental fantasy, all of which are responsible for structuring people’s beliefs, desires, and patterns of relations. The consequent problem that arises from structure as the exclusive source of causal power in the production of subjectivity via subconscious mechanisms is that structure becomes reified as something existing above and beyond $ubjects—​like an all-​powerful deity—​ that fully dominates the conscious sense of self. In a similar logic, for the analysand and their post-​therapy subjectivity (the subject as Real), intentional states of desire collapse into the drives, and though perhaps more “authentic” and no longer neurotic, render the subject, literally, an unconscious automaton, without any kind of effective agency. The lacuna in Lacanian theory resides between the conceptual overidentification of the $ubject either with the drive-​desire or the big Other. In either case, the $ubject is mere object, neither responsible nor empowered as a human agent. Whether controlled from within or from without, there is no ontological basis for a reflexive intentionality. As I argued above, Lacan does not explicitly theorize the basis upon which the analysand comes to their own subjectivization. What must be identified and explicated as having theoretical significance is a more complete ontology of the subject, which is crucial to modeling the dialectics of the structural interlocking of the subject within the world, both to their subconscious and existent sociocultural formations. Lacanian theorists must grant some causal power, however minimal, to the subject as an agent.

Existence is real (sort of…) A useful starting point for a psychoanalytic reconstruction of an agent-​ subject is existential psychotherapy. Like Lacanian psychotherapy, the existentialist canon is grounded in continental European thought in general and Freudian psychoanalytical theory in particular. The two psychoanalytical traditions also share a common teleological ethic to transform the analysand/​subject. Both seek to free the subject from blockage and neurosis stemming from subconscious intentional states that no longer bring satisfaction, if not recurrently repulsive. Both theorize the goal of therapy is reached when the inner impulse of “drive-​desires” or “potentialities” of the self can flourish.12 Nonetheless, significant differences in their approach to the psychic life of the subject disrupt any easy assimilation. Lacanian psychoanalysis focuses on the process of mediation and internalization of the social-​symbolic field constituting the neurotic subject, and the inevitable psychopathologies thus arising. Lacan also effaces the possibility of human agency by deconstructing the formation of the subject, divining it as a mirage generated out of the grammatical structure of language: inculcated into language (more precisely, the Saussurean theory of la langue employed by Lacan), the subject “I” and object “me” are only imaginary constructs people reify and cling onto as a false idol—​as a “self ”-​ ego. Furthermore, what people consciously feel of their self, as coherent,

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The subject of psychoanalysis 155 integrated, and “self-​projecting” (on those good days…), is rather the continuing ex post facto narration of prior experiences into a semblance of a fictional Cartesian ego.13 Existentialist psychoanalytic theory, in contrast, brings to the fore the question of existence as it presents itself to the subject at the level of conscious experience (of what people know of their own beliefs, desires, and relations) and the manifold challenges arising from the basic logic and problematics of being in the world. For the existentialist, essential qualities of being human include its relation to non-​being (meaninglessness/​castration/​ death); its positioning in space and time (sociocultural predication); its indeterminacy (freedom and responsibility); its causal power (reflexivity/​intentionality/​will); and its primary modes of experience (anxiety/​guilt/​isolation).14 It is far beyond the scope of this chapter to explicate fully the above existential parameters confronting the subject; however, their themes and burdens should be clear in essentials. Let it suffice that for existentialist psychotherapy these categories form the etiological basis for various “psychopathologies of being alive” which revolve around these parameters, which in general arise from the failure of the analysand to confront one or more of these “existential givens” of being conscious and sentient, and come to terms with their profound trials. Presupposing a meaningful and efficacious confrontation with these existential conditions is the capacity for a meta-​awareness (and gap) of reflexivity, by which the subject faces their human condition. The conscious stance taken by the subject to themselves—​reflexive awareness—​is foundational to the existentialist psychoanalytic project, in terms of both giving rise to existential problematics in the first place and compelling analysands to puzzle out solutions to their pathos in the second (and another notch in the belt of irony). Being conscious of being conscious predates both the problem of existence and the solutions to existence. This dynamic is ontological, and arises because subjects are reflexively aware of “becoming” in time, and thus recursively implicated in the production (in the form of a culturally circumscribed set of practices) of their biological and social existence.15 The implication, moreover, as Yalom argues, is that the basic framework of Freudian theory (and its Lacanian offshoot) remains incomplete because of its predominant focus on the “present event” in terms of “some past situation”: In this frame of reference, the causes of individual behavior are to be found in antecedent circumstances of a person’s life. There are many modes of explanation or systems of causality that do not rely on the past. For example, the future (our present idea about the future) is, no less than the past, a powerful determinant of behavior, and the concept of future determinism is fully defensible. The “not yet” influences our behavior in many, formidable ways. Within one, at both conscious and unconscious levels, there is a sense of purpose, an idealized self, a series of goals for which one strives, an awareness of destiny and of ultimate death. These

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156  The subject of psychoanalysis constructs all stretch into the future, yet they powerfully influence inner experience and behavior. (1980, 346) Yalom’s point extends the temporal range of reflexivity to include the past, present, and future as modes of conscious deliberation, all of which bear on the subject in their becoming because all three have significance and powers to affect people’s existence. Even the Freudian emphasis on uncovering past experiences affecting current behavior is motivated by a concern to effect change, as an impetus directed toward the future. The moment-​by-​moment experience of an unavoidable future (however uncertain the duration) in effect “turns our head” to what comes next, or, in other words, constitutes a subjective stance ineluctably orientated toward the future, even if just seconds away.16 Granted that the powers of subconscious motivation, repetition, and determination entail that most of people’s behaviors and judgments follow well-​entrenched pathways of least resistance, dogmatic design, heuristic shortcuts, and an apparent, widespread “biological impulse to conserve energy” rather than an exercise of conscious will. Despite the propensity to reproduce the status quo, the ontological independence of the subject-​agent can, in principle, make use of the ontological “gap” in the temporal unfolding of human existence. The subject-​agent can alter course in spite of relevant determinations, even if such a “course” is passive inaction. At precisely the conjuncture of the moment, the determinations of the past and future housed within the subject (on their beliefs, desires, motivations) can be mediated via the subject’s reflexive capacity, and consequently become manifest in our practices, that is to say, the materialization of human being. The becoming of human existence is characterized by two key qualities. It is a processual practice (it requires continual and repeated actions and decisions—​self-​gumption to get up in the morning and start a new day until death) and open (grounded in the contingency of the sociohistorical without an intrinsic telos).17 Unlike the “acorn unfolding into a tree of oak,” there is no intrinsic blueprint for a universal fulfillment of destiny or design of human being. Nor is human being caught in the life cycle of “lower-​order” forms of life (wolves, orangutans, slugs, and so on) merely fulfilling their biological imperatives (birth, life, sex, death), transformed only in the process of random gene mutations and evolutionary change. Nor is human being beholden to an “essence,” whether in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms, determining and delimiting the parameters of intentionality (intelligence, morality, and behaviors), whose endpoints are predetermined and presupposed at the embryonic stage, merely waiting to be expressed.18 Conceptions of human being, furthermore, that define its powers and intentional states solely in terms of the social positions an individual inhabits, such as “parent,” “employee,” “citizen,” and so on (as in the stereotypical mode of Durkheim and Althusser), fail to account for the ontology of the subject. This kind of sociological reduction is an

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The subject of psychoanalysis 157 improvement on conceptions of “the self ” postulating a metaphysical substance or an intrinsic human nature. It rectifies theological ontologies such as the Christian “soul” and its “original sin,” or its somewhat secularized version, the dualism of Descartes’ Mind as a special kind of substance over and above the material world. The sociological reduction also improves on Enlightenment strategies to uncover “Man” in his state of nature, from which political and social institutions could be designed to moderate and enhance humankind’s essential mode of being.19 However, the structuralist-​sociological reduction, with its anti-​metaphysics and objectivist assumptions, does not address universal capacities for human being that only a realist, emergentist account can assert. Counter to essentialist, metaphysicalist, and reductionist models of the subject, existential psychoanalytic theory postulates the ontology of the subject, in general terms, as a meta-​sentience operating as a precondition of the ego and the unique feature of human being over and above the level of awareness of other higher-​order animals.20 In contrast, the Lacanian qua Freudian elaboration of the ego finds it an epiphenomenal “remainder,” generated out of the conflict between the id-​drives and superego, and relatively weak, passive, and neurotic. In his critique of the Freudian conception, Rollo May (1994, 103) notes Freudianism only countenances three causal inputs in the formation of the subject, namely, “the ego ‘owes its service to three masters:  the external world, the libido of the Id, the severity of the Superego’.” In the same vein, Lacan overidentifies human being with either drive-​desires or the big Other, in both cases reducing human being to origins either “inside” or “outside,” by which the subject “disappears.” The counterpoint of the existentialists argues that despite all the determinations on human existence, subjects have a reflexive capacity resting within their conscious awareness on the fact of their being, which consequently opens a gap or space—​however minute—​of freedom toward these determinations. While all living things are subject to laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, most are also subject to an a priori pathway of basic potentialities in accord with the genetic blueprint of their species typification.21 Contrary to the latter, human beings hold an exceptional form of agency enabled to encounter its own process of existence in the ever-​present moment of indeterminacy (in the temporal act of becoming). The site of indeterminacy is at the crossroads, on the one hand of human drives and biological predilections, and on the other hand of a sociocultural context informed by ideologies, values, and structural positions, each with constitutive rules and derived interests. At precisely this point of openness, agents and structures are rendered visible as ontologically distinct. The ontology of the subject-​agent, and the keystone of humankind’s psychic unity, is conscious reflexivity, made possible through language, symbolization, and abstraction. May describes this “openness” as well as anyone, which operates as the precondition for an ontology of the subject in terms of agential causal power as it returns the features of being Freudian-​Lacanianism fails to account for:

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158  The subject of psychoanalysis Being is that which remains. It is that which constitutes this infinitely complex set of deterministic factors into a person the experiences happen and possesses some element, no matter how minute, of freedom to become aware that these forces are acting upon him… [Moreover], the distinctive character of human existence is Dasein…[which] indicates that man is the being who is there and implies also that he has a “there” in the sense that he can know he is there and can take a stand with reference to that fact. The “there” is moreover not just any place, but the particular “ there’ that is mine, the particular point in time as well space of my existence at this given moment. Man is the being who can be conscious of, and therefore responsible for, his existence. (Ibid., 96, italics May’s) In accordance with the situatedness and openness of being, existential psychotherapy seeks to draw analysands into awareness of this indeterminate space, the potentialities that can flow out of it, and their responsibility for what they have chosen—​or submitted of their existence to the control of others. Here, I think the Lacanian focus on the big Other synchronizes with existentialism in terms of the purpose and desired outcome of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Both are concerned with ameliorating psychopathologies, and both attempt to loosen the hold of the big Other on the analysand in trade for the subject becoming responsive to their own interests, needs, and desires. Lacanian and existentialist psychoanalytic theory conflict, however, over what ontological basis the new subjectivized subject comes to be. Or, in other words, they differ over the source-​mechanism of this “new dawn” of the self. For Lacanians, the mode is for the $ubject to collapse into the “truth” of one’s bodily drives; for existentialists, the mode is to take up fully one’s own agential power, to become aware of the implications of the indeterminacy of reflexive intentions in the confrontation with existential givens of life.22 For the existential subject, self-​consciousness in daily life includes “situational awareness” of one’s immediate surroundings (such as personal security) and one’s “economy of attention” to mass media, advertisements, and the multitude of responsibilities and people vying for one’s time. It also includes the potential to expand one’s awareness of the subtle or abstract ways one has entered into relations of subordination and exploitation at the interpersonal and structural level, or unacknowledged conditions of action that give advantage.23 The great challenge, and the profound contribution to theorizing the subject, derives from the psychoanalytic project to uncover subconscious effects in conscious experience concerning the unknown powers that shape people and their subjectivity bearing on their beliefs, desires, and the multitude of relationships they participate within. And, if it is assumed that successful treatment through psychoanalysis is possible, it is precisely the arrival of self-​reflexive knowledge of neurotic dispositions and attachments to the big Other and the constitutive power of the fundamental

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The subject of psychoanalysis 159 fantasy via the powers of socialization. On the flip side, without a conscious sense of the “ontology of the subject,” subjects fail to come to knowledge of and take responsibility for who they have become. They may, in a Sartrean vein, “self-​deceive,” blaming other people or the circumstances of their life for their own choices and resultant consequences.24 They may “self-​reify,” mistaking a contingent feature of their life as their essence by playing a role they take as “baked into” their genes, personality, or character. At the same time, people may not hold accountable agents who have greater control of the political, economic, and social structures that enable and constrain their lives. People may not have a framework to confront the determinations that influence their sense of self, leaving them disintegrated and dehumanized.

Conclusion Confronting the hold of the symbolic order and the effects of the structural positioning of the subject, and traversing the fundamental fantasy, has a central and profound consequence: it forces people to confront the existential void (the Real) that there is no transhistorical, transcultural foundation point for an intrinsic purpose or meaning of human being beyond the philosophical anthropology this book describes with absolute respect to DCR causal powers materialism. Foundational to the psychotherapeutic project, subjects at some level have an intrinsic capacity (though not necessarily exercised) to have reflexive awareness (subjectivization) of the drives, desires, and social determinations constituting the parameters of intentional conscious states. The therapeutic value of any and all psychotherapy must assume the sphere of freedom of self-​consciousness; otherwise psychoanalytic theory dissolves into futility and incoherence. The goal of existentialist psychotherapy is to help the analysand come to awareness of core powers of human being, of one’s ontological capacities, and how one’s powers bear on the inevitable confrontation with the vagaries of life and death. Awareness of human ontological features, of “being,” includes its temporal and spatial matrix of sociocultural emplacement. Subjects can ascertain their own agential powers and assess the structures of their time and place. It is ultimately in the practice of everyday life where social theory must peer behind the rote quality of the “typical day,” prearranged by responsibilities, obligations, necessities—​choices people have made (marriage, children, employment, acquisition of debt/​material belongings, and so on). These set pathways, however entrenched and irrevocable (once a woman gives birth, she is always a “mother” in some minimal sense), remain fundamentally extrinsic to the subject as it is described by a realist philosophical anthropology, and hence require a repeated act of choosing to “stay the course,” not a determination. In principle, the possibility of autonomous agency could radically disrupt the symbolic-​social order, despite the potential for negative consequences—​ censure, banishment, or imprisonment—​ from attempts to rewrite one’s

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160  The subject of psychoanalysis existence (and others’), however it affronts and violates the existing social order.25 While Lacanian psychoanalytic theory brings the analysand to the point of addressing the question of existence, the subject is supposed to find direction from some vague, internal wellspring in the form of $ubject as drive. This is wholly inadequate because it fails to account theoretically for the emergent causal power of agency in all its three modalities of human, sociocultural, and occupational. The purpose of uncovering the realist kernel in Lacan’s theory of the subject (as ontologically distinct from social structure and the cultural system, and thus, whose independent causal power must stem from the subject’s reflexive deliberation) entails that the process of psychotherapeutic subjectivization is, in principle, a thoroughly conscious process to take responsibility (in the agony and “nausea” of choosing) for whatever fills or overlies the existential void uncovered and confronted. Real generative mechanisms and causal structures are the extent of all points of reference within the symbolic sphere. Hence, the “discovery of being,” to use May’s book title, is equivalent to the “discovery of causal powers,” and from these people negotiate and navigate a Real world of possibilities and determinations. Apropos, the big Other names those ideologies, modes of lifestyle, and sets of practices that overwrite the void. Existentialism’s virtue is its explicit confrontation with both the problem and the lifetime process of repair. How people respond to (signify/​narrate) their relationship to the void (death, meaninglessness, freedom, etc.), demanding the phantasmic answer to the question what it is “to be,” is then the basis for their thinking, saying, and doing. The utopic possibility inherent to traversing fundamental fantasies, as the endpoint of the psychotherapeutic project, is the consequent of internally related features of human existence:  the ontological hiatus between agent and structure opens a modicum of space for the reflexive agent to self-​determine their own future, granted the powerful constraints structures almost always impose on agency. Ultimately, it is the subject coming to awareness of their human be-​ing as a foundational point for a sense of security, power, and reflexive awareness of the internal drives and external forces enabling and constraining us. Reflexivity is the foundation of human freedom and the ontological point of human agency as a causal power. The crucial element of self-​consciousness is reflexivity, the ability (though frequently retarded or absent) to monitor our experiences, thoughts, behaviors, and feelings of our being and respond through the option of altering our actions and reworking how we constitute our relationships to ourselves, others, and the world around. Awareness of being enframes both the subconscious and conscious life. The psychotherapeutic thrust of subjectivization, the act of eschewing self-​deception, of taking responsibility for one’s life, together form the “object” which the subject’s reflexivity capacity mediates.

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The subject of psychoanalysis 161

Notes 1 When referring to Lacan’s “theory of the subject,” I  follow Lacan’s use of the strike-​out “$ubject” to denote the “subject as mirage,” the empty place of the absent signifier we nonetheless hold on to, but fail to realize or “feel” its vacuity. I will be arguing this is not quite the case. 2 Sociocultural anthropology, and its use of “participant observation” as a primary method of conducting research, follows psychotherapy in terms of the level of contact with the specificity of the subject. The subconscious and psychodynamics are not normally “units of analysis” for anthropologists, who focus on social context and practices, social structures, and the negotiation of shared meanings/​ representations. There is in my mind, however, significant overlap of the two disciplines in regard to the prominent place the “big Other” holds in Lacanian theory. The big Other is a prime mechanism that integrates the subject to their sociohistorical milieu of collective meanings and social-​structural positioning. This process of integration is crucial to understanding how the differing causal powers of subject-​agents and social structures affect one another in the practice of social (re)production. 3 In most cases, the terms “subject” and “analysand” are to be considered interchangeable. I hold the premise that all analysands are subjects, and in principle, all subjects could be analysands, if not ought to be. 4 As discussed in chapter two, the concept of the “real” for DCR in relation to the “actual” and “empirical” identifies generative mechanisms and causal structures in service to the “causal powers criterion of reality.” Lacan’s use of the “Real” suggests some affinity to the DCR use of the term, but differs in one important way. For Lacan the Real has causal powers that influence behavior and subjectivity, unbeknownst to the subject and profoundly shaping the subject’s psychodynamics. The difference, however, is that the Real for Lacan always remains unknown. It marks what remains subconscious, always outside of conscious life and unrepresented. Be that as it may, the point of the Lacanian psychoanalytic project is to bring to light aspects of the Real, in an attempt to gain some measure of control of their powers. 5 Neurosis is typically considered an overt psychopathology. However, Freud claims that it characterizes all consciousness, and whether or not it reaches a degree of “pathology” is dependent on the level of distress of the subject, in terms of the extent to which neurosis is degrading their life, and the threshold past, from which the subject becomes motivated to seek help. 6 As the apt synopsis of Freud’s basic position regarding neurosis says, “The goal of psychotherapy is to replace neurotic misery with ordinary human unhappiness and to know what you are unhappy about.” 7 If we take “desire” in terms of libido, the objet petit a for particular subjects can run the gamut of possibilities:  liking “good legs,” having sexual fetishes, preferring blond or brown hair, and on and on. Desire in general takes its particular objet petit a out of a semiotic structure of meaningful differences a big Other has determined as valuable. Subjects are drawn to them irresistibly; however, desire is never satisfied, especially so in Western mass-​consumption societies, which take fulfillment of “our heart’s desires” as the fulcrum for profit-​making. So-​called lifestyle choices are rife with complex “self-​symboling” of identity and values, addressing the Other’s gaze (such as in the service of sexuality and social class hierarchy). For

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162  The subject of psychoanalysis

8

9

10 11

12 13

instance, the objet petit a of the “Pottery Barn look” contains both the sense of ultra-​sophisticated style and taste (accompanied by wine, art books, and an old-​ fashioned typewriter) and a causal, laid-​back space of domestic perfection. And yet, once people respond to the objet petit a evoked out of their idealized lifestyle patterns, they sadly remain deferred, unimpressed and unfulfilled by themselves. Fortunately, to keep the jouissance flowing, there are always bigger, better, and brighter phantasms on the market. In line with Nietzschean critical philosophy, it is always important to identify how unacknowledged values are “smuggled in” to animate “objective” philosophical and theoretical renderings of the human-​centered world. In this case, one possible way to understand the presumption of the “goodness” and benefit of psychotherapy is the value of “human flourishing” from an Aristotelian-​type virtue ethics operating as a telos of human being. By analogy, is there an explicit philosophical justification why medical treatment is considered a good? Sickness of, and injuries to, the body for the most part invoke a medical response in the absence of a “do not resuscitate” statement or the like. The point here is that the valuation of being well and uninjured as “better” than being sick and injured seems to be a universal ethical stance toward the body, revolving around the reduction of pain and preservation of performance. Žižek (2006, 6) writes: “the focus of psychoanalysis resides elsewhere: the Social, the field of social practices and socially held beliefs, is not simply on a different level from individual experience, but something to which the individual himself has to relate, which the individual himself has to experience as an order which is minimally ‘reified’, externalized.” My understanding of anti-​humanism is indebted to Ferry and Renaut (1990). My critique is in line with the standard rejoinders to so-​called anti-​humanist social theory, with its exclusive focus on structural powers in social explanation and modeling. For instance, the structural social ontologies of Althusser, Butler, and Foucault fail to give an explicit account of human agents of history, able to act in opposition to the normative effects of ideology, discourse, patriarchy, state power, etc. The troubling irony here—​revolving around their own political ethic to induce social change—​is they rely on some sort of agency to effect subversive behavior against hegemonic power. Is not the “end product” of the successfully psychoanalyzed subject-​ego, for both Lacan and existentialists, a fun and free-​loving atheist anarcho-​socialist? It is worth noting that much of the struggle against the hegemony of the Cartesian subject and its ill effects is traced to the mind-​body dualism on which Descartes relies to retain both a theology and the emerging scientific worldview espousing a mechanical determinist materialism. No doubt, except among mystics and the obscurantism of theology, substance dualism is thoroughly vanquished, leaving “materialism” the victor. Despite vainglorious attempts by eliminative materialists seeking to explain not only the “mind” solely in terms of the biological brain, but morality, aesthetics, and even Shakespeare’s sonnets in terms of evolutionary adaptive advantage and ultimately quantum physics, a fully materialist theory of emergence, granting the various levels of a stratified reality unique and non-​ reducible causal powers, provides a coherent model of how consciousness and reflexive deliberation give subjects a basic form of agency (causal power) and hence real ontological status. The problem for poststructuralists, deconstructionists, Heideggerians, and all those seeking to undermine the metaphysics of the

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The subject of psychoanalysis 163 Cartesian ego (and rightfully so) and undermine the subject-​object dichotomy so entailed (and again, rightfully so) is that dissolving “mind” as an essence and its ontological qualities of autonomy, rationality, and transparency “threw the baby out with the bathwater.” With any notion of agency eradicated, a theoretical void opens, object collapses into subject, and structural ontologies of the anti-​ humanists ascend. Reflexivity qua consciousness qua mind as an emergent power, though considerably less robust than the Cartesian ego with its rational autonomy and epistemological certainty, gives both agents and structures proper consideration in the social ontology I seek to explicate. 14 My understanding of existential psychoanalysis is derived, for the most part, from two seminal texts of the field in the US: Rollo May’s The Discovery of Being (first published in 1983)  and Irvin Yalom’s Existential Psychotherapy (1980). Incidentally, Peter Sloterdijk (2010) argues “rage” should be added to the pantheon of ontological modes of being. Furthermore, “intersubjectivity” as an ontological quality of human being seems equally valid. I also want to point out the conceptual homology of Yalom’s (1980, 8) “four givens of existence” (meaninglessness, isolation, death, and freedom), Archer’s “three orders of natural reality,” and Bhaskar’s four-​planar being. Despite their differences, each of these theorists is attempting to define, in manifest terms, key universal features of human beings upon which their subjectivity is founded, each with a different emphasis. I  do not see any mutual exclusion of Yalom, Archer, and Bhaskar’s essential qualities, suggesting all can be integrated into a greater ontology of the subject as embodied, psychodynamic, and socialized. Postmodern skepticism toward “essences” makes the realist project seem antiquated; however, it is clear that only by laying out universal features of humankind—​as an explication of a “species being” as a philosophical anthropology—​can a unified social theory be developed that transcends history and culture and at the same time can account for the contingencies of the concrete specificity of every human being as a node within the geohistory of humankind. 15 Our biological “mammalian” functions, of course, are culturally mediated. Sleeping, eating, sexuality, bodily elimination, sickness, and aging are highly inflected by the life and times we live in. But, nonetheless, biological functions endure and cannot be denied (for too long). 16 Many times a day (dozens, hundreds, if not more?) people make “micro-​choices” that materialize into practice moments later. For instance, a simple decision, “should I drink coffee or tea after lunch?” has potential consequences: for health (from caffeine consumption, diuretic effects, and antioxidants); for personal well-​ being (from productivity, relaxation, and sociality if drinking with friends); for identity (a macho man might say, “real men drink black coffee, only pansies and women drink tea”); and political-​economic systems (“will my cup of tea contribute to the continued impoverishment of female tea pickers in India, meanwhile aggravating the impoverishment of female coffee pickers in Colombia?”). All these consequences, however complex, hidden from view, fetishized by the big Other, or unintended, can in principle be known and considered (cost-​benefit analysis/​ethical calculus). 17 In no way should the indeterminacy of human being be conceptualized to diminish the necessity and power of social predicates in the formation of the subject. Learning a language, acquiring “know-​how,” becoming a recognizable “human being,” is a social process. This process, however, does not entail that subject-​agency is a mirage, as Lacan infers.

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164  The subject of psychoanalysis 18 Concerning the essence of human being, controversies surround the power of nature versus nurture in the formation of gender and sexuality. Are tendencies toward heterosexuality and homosexuality innate or learned? Is the femininity of women and masculinity of men a function of well-​patrolled cultural categories or a consequences of hormonal differences? For the purposes of this book, I  espouse agnosticism/​skepticism toward these controversies and only provide a “no comment.” First, I see contradictory evidence for both positions; second, because gender and sexuality seem to emerge in more of a spectrum than hard dichotomies; and third, because these controversies are secondary to the deeper existential questions surrounding the meaning and historical unfolding of human being as an inclusive phenomenon concerning all people, above all categories and typologies that divide people. 19 Western philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-​ Jacques Rousseau, and John Rawls all develop political philosophies constituted out of particular “state of nature” hypotheses that ground arrangements of authority and power in terms of deontological commitments (ethics, law, duty), usually in virtue of (a supposed) universal reason. It is worth noting additionally that “state of nature” hypotheses fall on an axis, with human nature as intrinsically “bad” or “good” at either end. Famously, Hobbes proposes the brutish, violent egoist as humankind’s essence; Rousseau proposes the pure-​hearted and moderate “noble savage.” 20 Roy Bhaskar (1998, 35)  describes it this way:  “Human action is characterized by the striking phenomenon of intentionality…which enables [people] not just, like the other higher-​order animals, to initiate changes in a purposeful way, to monitor and control their performances but to monitor the monitoring of these performances and to be capable of a commentary upon them” (Italics mine). As I  discussed in chapter four, Margaret Archer terms this meta-​monitoring “the internal conversation” and “reflexive deliberation” for this powerful form of conscious intentionality. 21 I think it fair to say there is a profound ontological difference in terms of intentionality between genetic-​instinctual behaviors such as birds building a nest, ants a hill, and bees a hive, and the process whereby human beings create a “built environment” and develop discourses and ideologies. Through these “derivative intentionalities,” prior intentional acts are built up and aggregate into larger systems of ideas, entities, and social institutions. For instance, scientific knowledge, technological capabilities, liberal individualism, representative democracy, and laissez-​faire capitalism are instances of large-​scale social and cultural formations of prior intentionalities that form the structures associated with “Western civilization,” through which “Western” agents come to be. 22 In principle I  do not see any intractable barrier to self-​knowledge except its practical impossibility for logistical reasons—​limitations of money, time, and motivation—​and all the epistemic problems of “writing history” in general and of the self in particular. The main point, nonetheless, is that a “realist” account of the self—of ourselves—in ontological terms (and all things being equal), is logically possible, despite being difficult. 23 As these almost always coincide, coming to understand the interpersonal power dynamics we live out can illuminate structural dynamics and vice versa. 24 One, if not the chief, critique of Sartrean existentialism is that Sartre granted too much autonomy and freedom to his theory of existential agency, granting the

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The subject of psychoanalysis 165 agent almost unconstrained possibilities of being. What is missing is a model of the constraints (social and natural structures effecting their own types of causal power) that are necessarily present in any and all context of human agency. No wonder upper-​class, highly educated people living in our contemporary “First World” are attracted to Sartre’s message, having historically and socioeconomically the greatest range of possible modes existence perhaps in world history. Nonetheless, there is something valuable and true about Sartre’s warning: even in the most repressive of social spaces—​prisons, concentration camps, gulags, and so forth, where life and death exist so closely—​a choice remains for the individual to submit to absolute domination or to commit suicide. Harsh, but to the point. The overly autonomous, free, and frictionless Sartrean agent, not ironically, is, in its formation, theoretically inverse to the Lacanian subject. And accordingly, I think in a basic way Sartre and Lacan, if reconciled, supplement each other’s defects. 25 Unfortunately, instead of seeking to transform ourselves and the world around us, it appears the more typical reaction to existential crisis and disenchantment with “the world at large” is withdrawal, inaction, and quietude.

Bibliography Bhaskar, Roy. 1998. The Possibility of Naturalism:  A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. New York: Routledge. Ferry, Luc, and Alain Renaut. 1990. French Philosophy of the Sixties:  An Essay on Antihumanism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Fink, Bruce. 1999. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. May, Rollo. 1994. The Discovery of Being. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2010. Rage and Time:  A Psychopolitical Investigation. New  York: Columbia University Press. Yalom, Irvin. 1980. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. “How to Read Lacan 4. From Che Vuoi? to Fantasy: Lacan with Eyes Wide Shut.” Lacan.com, July 7. Accessed March 19, 2016. www.lacan.com/​ essays/​?p=146&cpage.

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6  The subject of structure

Introduction: human agency redux Human agency, as discussed in chapter four, is a unique capacity of being human; and in terms of delineating a human agent, the human body provides a preliminary site for its criterion of identity for self and other.1 While bodies have a discrete existence, being positioned in time and space, it is the unique evolutionary characteristic of humankind that the unthinking, rote behaviors associated with animal instinct have fallen away, and are replaced by the process of implicit (unconscious) enculturation and overt (conscious) socialization. Furthermore, we have examined human subjectivity in basic terms as the set of beliefs and desires each person holds. Subjectivity at the individual level—​as its “mouthfeel”—​also contains a unique psychodynamic on the one hand, and the set of sociocultural and occupational forms of agency each person acquires by birth and individual choice and merit on the other. What subject-​agents know, how they live, and the values they hold come by way of experience, education (formal, informal, and tacit), and reflection on their state of being in the world. The crucial element in this process of human maturation is the various forms of intentionality (viz., the states of awareness that include desires, beliefs, perceptions, and so on), which constitute the relationship of the self to itself in terms of self-​awareness and personal circumstances (intrasubjectivity), the relationship of the self to the social milieu (intersubjectivity with the other), and the relationship of the self to the world at large (through its embodied existence). All three relationships are predicated on the capacities for representation by and symbolic exchange through language. Language acquisition is the primary point of connection, circumscribing specific cultural and social practices, and linking human being (for individuals and families, communities, polities, etc.) to its place in time and space. The socialization of human being, consequently, materializes this “being” in relation to a set of social forms, which establish the historical-​world moment of an individual’s life. Simultaneous, nonetheless, is the need to account for human agency within the interplay of powers of the social as they are mediated by individual

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The subject of structure 167 subjects. The concept of agency, in its dictionary definition, is the ability to act and/​or ability to exert power. This definition works well in the natural sciences (the intransitive domain), whereby agency refers to mechanisms and entities that exhibit force or effects on matter, such as gravity, magnetism, and chemical agents (like acids and bases). The dictionary is less helpful in consideration of the nature of agency as it relates to human beings. Any sort of analogy between human beings and the forms of agential power attached to nonhuman entities in the world fails to capture the profound differences between the social and inanimate domains. Human agency is distinguished from the type of agency associated with the mechanical laws of nature by the structure of conscious intentionality and interlocking capacities for reflexivity and intersociality. As the powers of human agency require its social instantiation to actually make, say, or do anything, human agency is thus recursively implicated in the production of conditions necessary for “actually existing agency” of sociocultural agency and occupational agency.2 The self-​directedness of human agency in virtue of reflexivity is the basis for an ontology of the subject.3 However, just as human agency must be distinguished from forms of causal power found in the inanimate intransitive domain, human agency must also differentiate itself from the causal powers associated with social forms. As Wight notes (2006, 206), agency in the social world, if defined broadly as the ability to “exert power,” would also include social structures and cultural formations, which, as having emergent causal powers to enable and constrain individual agents, and hence “exerting power,” would eliminate the ontological distinction between agents and structures. On the contrary, agents and structures exist on different strata, and hence hold different kinds of causal powers. Accounting for this difference confronts the analyst of human affairs with these requirements: how are we to discern the nature and causal powers associated with both agents and structures, and how do these entities interact? The question has been largely answered by pulling “agency” apart and identifying human agency as ontologically independent from sociocultural and occupational forms of agency. This first move, however, requires additional explication of the different forms of “agency,” the agency intrinsic to human beings, and the nature of the power of social forms.

The problem: agency and structures Previous chapters have considered human agency in terms of consciousness, subjectivity, and the causal power of reflexive deliberation. With the concept of agency in hand, it is time to turn to the other side of the equation, namely that of coming to terms with the agent-​structure problem and the independent question of social ontology (which will be addressed explicitly in the next chapter). The problem of agents and structures concerns the foundational ontological commitment of all conceptual inquiry into the nature of human beings and societies in which they exist. It concerns what powers and capabilities are intrinsic to humankind and how extrinsic circumstances come

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168  The subject of structure to influence their behavior. It seeks to understand how components of the “external world” are internally related to the formation of socially inscribed individual agents. Consequently, any answer to the agent-​structure problem and concomitant social ontological axioms forms a metatheory of the relationship between agents and structures. As a metatheory primarily concerned with identifying the nature of the causal powers they hold, it remains an abstract account that provides the deep philosophical basis for subsequent social theory and analysis of the actual and empirically experienced world. Concrete accounts of agents and structures embedded in domains of socioeconomic, cultural, and historical processes are divvied up by social-​scientific and humanitarian disciplines, in service to substantive explanation and understanding of “real” people doing, saying, and making “real” things. As an immediate corollary, the DCR realist account of the agent-​structure problem parleys with various social-​ theoretical orientations and their ontological assumptions—​ liberal, empiricist, postmodernist, and structurationist—​ whose implicit or explicit ontologies have given rise to mistaken answers to the agent-​structure problematic. The DCR answer rejects the three dominant theories of agents and structures and their relationship:  ontological individualism (that society and culture are only epiphenomena of individual monadic behavior as the aggregate effect of this behavior and form discernible patterns); ontological structuralism (that individual subjectivity is constituted fully by its internal relations to language and sociocultural and/​or geohistorical location); and variations of structuration theory (propounded by Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, whereby agency and structure are mutually constitutive, what Archer calls theories of “elisionism” in that agents and structures are analytically distinct, but not ontologically). Contrary to ontological individualism, ontological structuralism, and ontological elisionism, DCR social theory incorporates the independent causal powers of both agents and social structures in a process ontology. The ontology of the subject rests in the capacity for reflexivity, by which the subject, in principle, can monitor their beliefs, desires, and behaviors, and in relation to the degree of autonomy and freedom accorded by the social context can reevaluate their concerns, reform their projects, and revise their practices. Nonetheless, subject-​agents never exist outside a nexus of sociological, ecological, and ideational deep structures that precede the subject in time and operate as necessary conditions for all meaningful (social) practices. Indeed, the social formations of subjects’ upbringing always preexist them (from family, nation, global historical location, etc.) and are a necessary condition for all intentional human activity. The task thus is to identify the causal power of social structures and how they interlock with the modalities of agential praxis. Fundamental to rectifying social ontological analysis across the theoretical terrain is to theorize the temporality of structural reproduction (or transformation) in relation to its emergence in the concerns, projects, and practice of subject-​agents. Social theories rallying around the flags of ontological

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The subject of structure 169 individualism, ontological structuralism, or ontological conflationism are impoverished because they fail to grant independent ontological status to both agents and structures, and to account for their different forms of causal power in the world. Without close attention to the temporality of practice and an account of how social antecedents form the structure of constraints and enablements granted to subject-​agents in a process of “absenting absences,” social theory fails to reckon the dynamic mediation of structure by agency. Moreover, it is precisely the absence of the temporality of human being that precludes the easy theoretical assimilation of both social stasis as system reproduction and social disruption as system transformation (of the “event” and/​or historical change) within reductionist social ontologies privileging either the individual or structure, or the opaque elisionist amalgam. Only by conceptualizing the relationship between agents and structures in their interplay toward the production of social reality does the temporality of its unfolding become front and center to the ontology of the social world.

The solution: efficient and material causation The power of social forms to condition human agency, and the power of agents to transform those forms, stems from the independent causal powers of agents and forms. Even though social forms emerge from agential practice, once materialized and enduring (as the longue durée of legal codes, institutions, social structures, ideologies, practical skill sets, etc.), social forms take on an independent ontological status by virtue of their intrinsic causal power to affect agents. Nonetheless, the causal power of social forms must be a different type of causality than the causal power of agency, to avoid the reification of structure as having an intrinsic volition to “make” agents do this or “tell” agents to do that. DCR avoids reifying structure because the causal powers of agents and structures map onto the distinction between “efficient cause” and “material cause” as formulated in the fourfold Aristotelian typology of causation.4 For DCR social ontology, reflexive deliberation in practice, the “saying, making, and doing” of human agency, is essentially an unceasing production in process, an “efficient cause” of the social world. In conjunction to the efficient cause of agency is the necessity of a “material cause” formed by the myriad social forms that constitute the geohistorical context of all human agents.5 As argued in chapter four, foremost to the capacity for reflexive intentionality of human agency are antecedent social structures of sociocultural and occupational positions, which both enable and constrain human agency. To repeat a quote from chapter four, these positions condition and prefigure agents by “what there is (structurally and culturally) to be distributed and also for the shape of such distributions; for the extant role array, the proportion of positions available at any time and the advantages/​ disadvantages associated with them” (Archer 2007, 28, quoted from Archer 1995, 201) in terms of their attendant rights, obligations, and liabilities that adhere to particular social-​structural positions.6

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170  The subject of structure To explain the difference between efficient and material causation, Aristotle gives the classic “sculpture analogy,” to show how the interlocking logics of efficient and material causation both differ and yet result in mutual conditioning. In simplest terms, the efficient cause is the sculptor (or agent), who confronts a material cause of tools and stone (structure). The tools and marble both enable and constrain the sculptor to carve a desired shape into the stone. To produce a sculpture, on the one hand, the efficient causal power of human agency is required as the propulsive force behind the transformation of an inert material to its final shape. On the other, the causal power of a material cause emerges from the conditions it sets as an object transformed in the act of human production. Sculptors use a material medium (clay, metal, ice, stone, etc.) and tools (hands, chisels, arc welders, polishing paste, etc.), all of which have different intrinsic qualities and capacities that condition and constrain a sculptor’s creation. At the same time, only by having these materials at hand—​a medium and tools—​can a sculptor begin sculpting. The material cause in this sense “enables” a sculptor to act, and, following the analogy, the possibilities of agency “in the real world” are fashioned out of the “material” of social structure, that is to say, human efficient agency is thoroughly predicated on its position within a social structure—​as the material cause—​in order to do, say, and make almost anything. This analogy consequently lays bare problems with ontological individualism (volunteerism), ontological structuralism (holism), and elisionism. Moreover, the analogy shows why the process of production of a sculpture in terms of causality requires the ontological reality of both agents (qua sculptor) and structures (qua medium and tools) and their different but complementary forms of causal power—​efficient and material. Ontological individualists are committed to the view that “society” is nothing more than an abstract way of talking about individuals and their actions. Consequently, without taking into account how preexisting social structures and cultural products precondition the possibilities for human intentional actions, in terms of the sculptor analogy, the individual is always “reinventing the wheel” by independently envisioning the idea of sculpting rock and the tools required, making tools from scratch, mining the rock, and thus displaying total creative control and power over the final “shaped rock.” Sculpting, the subjective experience of being a sculptor, and the production of a sculpture are thus only known in this individual instantiation of carving rock—​until the next time another individual reinvents the process. Without social predicates in operation, the individual is left causa sui, requiring a constant “remaking” of the knowledge and materials at hand. In the case of structural ontologies, in which society determines the individual in the last instance, the analogy also shows how the logic of ontological structuralism is lopsided and implausible. While the stone, tools, and practical knowledge required to sculpt preexist any new act of sculpting, the “sculptor” has no choice but to behold the stone, pick up the hammer and chisel, and begin chipping away at its uneven surface (the wheel

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The subject of structure 171 reinvents the subject). As the power of the tools and stone determines the individual, over and above whatever idea they may have of their actions, the chisel and stone force the individual into the act of sculpting, irresistibly dictating what angles to cut and how hard to hit. Only on the final stroke is the individual recognized as a sculptor, fully interpellated into society, standing before a statue identical to all previous acts of sculpting. Reconceptualizing this analogy in Lacanian terms, the tools and stone are the objet petit a, and the impetus to the final sculpture so produced, the effect of the big Other. In elisionist social ontology, agents and structures are ontologically conflated in the moment-​by-​moment practice that people undertake in the routine course of their lives. The ontological “heading” of elisionism is ultimately the knowledge people hold about their world, where agents also have knowledge of their structured context, and thus the subjective and objective are fused together in terms of knowledge.7 At any and every moment, agents and structures form each other—​an ontological collapse—​which ultimately locates social causality as “rules of the game,” “algorithms of sociocultural identity,” or “practical knowledge” as they inform practices, conduct, and behavior. The supposed value of elisionism is to overcome both the reductionist tendencies of ontological individualism and structuralism and the subject/​object division, over which reductionist theories necessarily take a side. The resultant irony of elisionism is that the two most prominent advocates of conflationist ontology, Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, reproduce similar problems found with ontological individualism and structuralism, despite their attempts to avoid them. For both, the causal powers of agency and structure are collapsed into a singular moment that either tends toward an ontologically volunteerist approach (as Giddens’ critics note) or an ontologically holist approach (as Bourdieu’s critics note). Elisionist volunteerism grants individual agents the capacity for discursive awareness (as knowledge) of their situation and a degree of freedom to self-​determine—​causality is thus a function of the individual as a force of their understanding. Elisionist holism locates conscious subjectivity as part and parcel of the social field, in which the subject’s location in the field determines the content of their subjectivity in terms of beliefs, desires, and “unconscious embodied dispositions”8 (as knowledge)—​causality is thus a function of the social as a force of inscription within a worldview (Archer 2003, 166). In Archer’s thorough repudiation of elisionism (1995, 2003; Donati and Archer 2015), she argues the attempt to transcend the agent-​structure problem ends up mystifying structures and dehumanizing agents. Elisionists suppose subject and object, agent and structure, are “mutually constitutive…such that agents cannot act without drawing upon structural properties whose own existence depends on their instantiation by agents” (Archer 1995, 13). Agents and structures are “ontologically inseparable,” equal to a temporal collapse whereby the effects of structure come to be only at the moment of agential practice (ibid., 93). However, without an ontological gap separating structure

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172  The subject of structure from agency, “there is no sense in which [structure] can be either emergent or autonomous or pre-​existent or causally influential” (ibid., 97, italics Archer’s). The problem with theorists of conflation, in Archer’s view, is that: Their respective approaches to human practices generically preclude one from disengaging the properties and powers of the practitioner [in terms of reflexive deliberation over concerns, projects, and practices] from the properties and powers of the environment [in terms of enablement and constraint] in which practices are conducted—​and…this prevents analysis of their interplay. (2003, 6) Individuals and society are considered merely as “two sides of the same coin,” elided in practice, and united by whatever knowledge subjects hold (1995, 93, quoting Craib 1992, 3–​4). As a “social ontology of praxis” (1995, 99), elisionism alleges that it is only at the moment of practice that road and rubber meet, that relevant structural properties come into existence by an agent. The philosophical failure of elisionism rests on its explicit repudiation of emergent causal powers and the DCR depth ontology it entails. Elisionism is another version of ontological actualism, flat and empirical, having “turn[ed its] back upon any autonomous features which could pertain independently to either ‘structure’ or ‘agency’ ” (ibid., 97). All that stands in ontological terms is a list of what agents know, the practical knowledge they hold, and the resources they command in relation to what they do not know, the skills they do not have, and resources they lack. What is lost in conflationist accounts are the effects of past generations and the structured effects of their practices as they bear on the present. Nor do they account for concurrent effects of other agents as they reproduce sociocultural forms, systems, meanings, and structures, informing the context for each agent. Nor do they account for distributions of resources, demographic trends, and systems of rules and regulations that prefigure agents and are causally constituting and constraining in their lives. Elisionism fails to sequence the interplay of agency and structure, fails to grant subject and object their respective powers that bear on the emergent social reality, which thus demands a causal account of their powers and necessitates a theory of emergent causal powers of both agents and social-​contextual factors. Moreover, a fundamental critique of elisionism pertains to its relationship to the political-​economic present. In Donati and Archer’s (2015) analysis, elisionism reflects the logic of the consumerist culture of multinational capitalism, the trope of its “liquid nature,” and the 40-​year crisis in economic growth known as “the Great Stagnation” (Cowen 2011) or “the long stagnation” (Krugman 1994, xiv). In the context of the US, the shift toward “political centrism,” indicated by the term “Washington Consensus,” whereby both Republican and Democratic Party platforms coalesced around neoliberal principles during the late 1970s and early 1980s, has been the foremost response to the Great Stagnation, and retained its hold more or less

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The subject of structure 173 intact through President Barack Obama’s tenure.9 The neoliberal subject, as a self-​determined and unconstrained individual, is enshrined in the ideologies of “positive thinking,” “self-​help,” and “prosperity gospel,” and herein lies a contradiction. Donati and Archer argue: [As] the economic crisis of late modernity became entrenched, it accentuated the incongruity between the cultural “ideal” of Individualism and the structural influences that preceded, precipitated, and prolonged this state of affairs in the economy, which are irreducible to individualistic terms. (2015, 4, italics mine) In other words, the unintended consequences of slowing productivity gains, low GDP growth, and growing income inequality—​no thanks to the politico-​ legal shift to defend the profits of finance capital despite diminished economic growth—​have become the emergent and sui generis structural conditions within which people “work out” their concerns, projects, and practices in our historical epoch. At the same time, the neoliberal program, especially in the US, deunionized and depoliticized worker agency by pushing “right to work” laws, attacking the welfare state, and undermining faith in the federal government as a force for social stability and collective well-​being. Thus is an inverse relation between the growing structural crisis of society and the disempowering individualization of its members. It is precisely the “anti-​politics” of neoliberal ideology which transposes economic structural problems as a personal problem for people alone to solve. It is in this political-​economic context that conflationist theory becomes intertwined with neoliberal economic and cultural ideology. The expanding influence of elisionism throughout social science has the unhappy coincidence to arrive at the moment the hyper-​individualism of neoliberalism penetrated the social order in law, policy, and practice. As Donati and Archer note (ibid., 8–​13), Giddens and Bourdieu are the conceptual backbone of contemporary sociological theory, and pointedly of the elisionist-​influenced “relational sociology” prevalent in North America, which conceives “the social” as networks of individual-​to-​individual transactions. In Donati and Archer’s view, these trends devolve into a non-​critical form of sociology, because the social is conflated with the individual at the moment of practice with respect to the knowledge they bring to bear in their transactions in the walk of life, such as in marriage, employment, becoming a citizen, applying for a home loan, and so on. Elisionism and neoliberalism dovetail in virtue of their mutual disregard for the emergence of social forms. While it is tempting to view elisionism as an effect of the neoliberal order (in the clunky sense of Marxian “economic determinism,” such that the material base determines the ideological superstructure), I would argue their simultaneity is contingent in the sense that elisionism is not so much an inadequate and/​or mystified theory of the subject, but a fairly apt description. At a broader level, Donati and Archer note that the historical “parallel[ism]”

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174  The subject of structure of elisionism and the political economics of neoliberalism connect by the status of capitalism as a TINA formation (“there is no alternative”) (ibid., 5). Without an emergent, causal powers account of structural effects, the global determination of capitalism as the political and economic backdrop of both elisionism and neoliberalism becomes philosophically “naturalized,” “God-​given,” or “inbuilt to human nature.” Economics, on the one hand, has always considered itself the “king of the social sciences,” keen to slice through cultures, history, and personal vagaries to find the rational kernel of economic activity, and emergent social predicates have no place here. On the other, the emergent powers of the social have literally dropped out of transactional models of social theory in the same way the biological “givens” of human capacities (whose importance will be further developed in chapter eight) and dispositions for reflexivity and personhood are untheorized, taken for granted, and considered irrelevant to understanding social reality. What remains are relatively unbound agents, making transactions without reference to a grounded social context, which effectively dehistoricizes their practices as only an unfolding, moment-​by-​moment praxis. Elisionism’s flat ontological actualism can do no more than provide a description of the ideology and juridico-​political ordering of the neoliberal subject. Elisionism is thus a consequence of ontological confusion: the structural effects of neoliberalism are reified as ontological features of human being. Contemporary elisionists take up the neoliberal subject (autonomous, frictionless, self-​ creating, self-​ determining, and grounded in an amoral consumerism) and, without surprise, theorize the nature of the subject as such.10 However, rather than finally discovering the nature of a universal, “ideologically free” subject, the insights elisionists supposedly grasp only mirror the ideal depoliticized and decontextualized subject of the socioeconomic order (pushed to play, (re)create, and seek pleasure in the market). The goal of elisionism to transcend agents and structure, and their ontological conflation, led to supposedly a more sophisticated understanding of subjects in the world, with “flows replac[ing] structures, narratives displac[ing] culture, and human plasticity mak[ing] the fluidity of [their] putative serial re-​invention homological with the equally putative liquidity of the social order” (ibid., 5). However, without a clear delineation of agential powers as opposed to contextual powers, the ascending tropes of fluidity and liquidity emit whiffs of anti-​humanism and indeterminism:  everything solid is melted, signifiers become unmoored from their signified, authors perish, and “Man” is dead—​ an ontological implosion. The conflated individual merely repeats the supposed ontological basis of the neoliberal subject. Returning to the sculpture analogy, in the elisionist model, the material constraints of rock and tools are not a real, emergent causal power but one whose influence on the act of sculpting is reduced to the knowledge the sculptor has of their properties. Subject and object thus are conflated in terms of the knowledge the sculptor-​ subject has of her own “subjective” capacities, skill sets, and perspectives on sculpting, in addition to

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The subject of structure 175 her knowledge concerning the “objective” conditions set by her tools and the medium she is working within. Moreover, for the elisionist, all social conditions and capacities of the sculptor (her ability to reflexively deliberate on her concerns, projects, and practices related to sculpting; her ability to deliberate on her own psychodynamics that shape her motivation and desire to sculpt; and all the social predicates that establish her ability to sculpt:  sociohistorical location, education, having sufficient allowances of time, money and freedom to sculpt, etc.) are not granted independent emergent sui generis (material) causal powers. As it is clear, the problem with “rules and resources” or “practical knowledge” as the ontological site for the subjective and objective to collapse in practice is that all this knowledge is really tied to objective, material conditions that prefigure her knowledge of them. She may clearly “know” she is free to sculpt, not having political or sexist constraints on her freedom for instance, but the condition of freedom for her is real and actual, and therefore emergent. If she did not know she is free, she would certainly learn fast. The case is likewise for her tools and medium. She may have full knowledge of how to sculpt using different tools and media, but it is an independent fact of her knowledge that chainsaws are highly effective for wood sculpture but dangerously less so for stone. Her knowledge does not make it so; the referents of her knowledge do. There is no way, consequently, to avoid postulating the independence of efficient causation and material causation when understanding the interplay of agency and structure, because they have different ontological features (causal powers) that cannot be conflated. The distinction Aristotle makes between efficient and material modes of causation consequently clarifies the DCR claim for the relatively independent ontological status of both agents and structures. For agency, the ontology of the agent-​subject so far discussed has relied on abstracting a reflexive capacity that forms the basis for human agency that individual agents (one hopes) exercise as a sui generis causal power. Archer’s theoretical advance on the matter, developed in chapter four, shows that reflexivity is necessary to a theory of the subject as having ontological reality in terms of efficient causal power and not as a cipher or “zombie” of society: class, race, gender, etc. (Donati and Archer 2015, 7). Archer also shows that the intrinsic ontological independence of the subject-​human agency is always socially mediated by sociocultural and occupational forms of agency, which preexist any particular agent while simultaneously constituting the structured and intersubjective context for their development of concerns, projects, and practices in relation to the subject positions they hold and in relation to other people with their own subject positions. I will note that Bhaskar developed a concept similar to Archer’s analytic breakdown of agency to its three separate modes of agency123.11 Bhaskar’s more general term is “positioned-​practice-​places,” which references the point of contact where human agency and social structure of sociocultural and occupational positions interlock. Bhaskar’s concept captures the relational nature of many social-​structural positions, the

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176  The subject of structure interests and outlooks (subjectivity) associated with various positions, and their processual nature through and materialist grounding in practice. In sum, human agency, mediated through structures of sociocultural and occupational forms of agency, elaborates the agent-​structure relationship. Human agency is ontologically independent from structure (though agency is always relative to this structure) and has an emergent and sui generis form of efficient causal power, grounded in human consciousness. The structures of sociocultural and occupational forms of agency have an emergent and sui generis form of material causal power, grounded in the intentions, concepts, and activities of human agents. Agents and structures are ontologically distinct but tightly interlaced by their emergent characteristics. Nonetheless, several questions are begged, which the remainder of this chapter and the next will answer. Human beings live in a world of their own making that simultaneously enables and constrains their lives. What is an emergent structure? What is the nature of these powers of meaning, identity, institutions, and positions, and what mechanism is causally responsible for their emergence?

Structure, culture, and social ontology Coming to terms with the meaning of “structure” is a problem. The term is used ubiquitously throughout the social sciences to define specific social activities or entities in relation to the particular social-​theoretical tradition employed and the units of analysis under investigation. Researchers speak of social structures of political, economic, familial, and international relations, and so on. Structures are generally identified as discrete entities composed of a set of interrelated parts. Structure is used as a synonym for a building, as in “what is that structure over there?” (Wight 2006, 218). It is also used to help define complicated “things” in the world, for example, the structure of the US government, the structure of a cell, or the structure of English grammar. In the mid-​20th century, “structural functionalism,” a social-​scientific philosophy prevalent in sociology and anthropology (now largely discredited), understood society as a structure of interrelated elements (norms, beliefs, practices, values, institutions) that “function” together, producing what were supposed stable, coherent, and bounded societies. In addition, consider the titles of two works of epistemology: Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and Lawrence Bonjour’s The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (1985). Kuhn attempts to uncover the archetypical process through which scientific revolutions unfold and the consequential incommensurability of different paradigms of scientific knowledge. Bonjour argues in favor of a “coherence theory of truth,” to combat skepticism and to critique foundationalist accounts of empirical knowledge. Structure, as used by Kuhn and Bonjour in their titles, is deployed to signify that their epistemological investigations account for all core features, processes, and practices relevant to full knowledge (in their view) of their subject matter:  scientific paradigm shifts or a coherentist account of empirical knowledge justification. The examples given above are unproblematic usages of the term “structure,”

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The subject of structure 177 employed as an analytical framework to make sense of a complicated world of entities and processes within it (a cell, society, or knowledge production, etc.). It denotes more or less coherent and bounded sets of relationships among component parts of a larger whole or process. Complications and controversies, nonetheless, arise for “structure” when a definition or understanding of it grants a structure ontological reality and emergent causal powers. Structure, in this sense, is not merely a heuristic device or a methodological procedure to aid analysis and understanding; rather, out of the relationships among the elements held in structure (however defined) emerges something new, an independent causal power not reducible to its component parts. Most of the preceding chapters have discussed and given examples of “social structures” and foreshadow the more systematic description to follow. Nonetheless, the “subject” of structure is ultimately, therefore, the subject’s social relations, which each person has in overlapping magnitudes of scale, from the personal to the global. Social structures are inherently relational. They are configurations of social positions (sociocultural and occupational modes of agency) that invest people with sets of identities, interests, and powers. They are emergent, relatively enduring, and provide the material causal powers human agency requires for its “real-​ world” instantiation. Predominantly through natality, sociocultural locations emplace each person in categories (real and imagined) of race, gender, class, language, religion, ethnicity, and a world system position in virtue of their nation-​state affiliation(s). People’s sociocultural backgrounds frequently place individuals in hierarchical and/​or antagonistic relations with people coming from other backgrounds, and in formative ways determine their existential fate. Whether Jew or Muslim, black or white, privileged or impoverished, German or French, the advantages, disadvantages, or indifferences of these positions are constituted by their relationships to others. Occupational positions give people specific rights, duties, responsibilities, and liabilities associated with roles and jobs. Hierarchical bureaucracies, such as corporations, militaries, governments, and the Catholic Church are instances of social structures12 with highly defined positions and chains of command. However, decentralized careers of the self-​employed and small business owners still operate within a structure of other like businesses and the larger economy, wary of the price and demand structure that shapes production and exchange. People become mothers and fathers, professors and prisoners, divorcees and polygamists. Through the course of life, people engender new relations and lose relations; they join groups (civic, political, recreational) and enter into institutional relations (prisons, hospitals, state bureaucracies), taking up new stances vis-​ à-​vis other positions, such as when joining a political party or becoming a patient, parolee, or anti-​litter activist. The key feature of social relations, witnessed in Hegel’s famous “master-​slave” relation, is that “subject positions” with any sort of power or liability are constituted by internal relations to other positions. The powers and liabilities of one position are intrinsically dependent on complementary powers and liabilities of another: parent-​child, husband-​wife, private-​sergeant, president-​vice president, etc.13

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178  The subject of structure Emergent social structures also consist of demographic trends that can causally redound back upon a society. Distributions of age, gender, and relative wealth, for instance, especially when unbalanced and constraining, can have profound political and economic consequences. Falling rates of birth lead to aging populations, such as in Japan, Italy, and Greece. China’s “one-​ child policy” has purportedly led to a large disparity of men and women and the negative consequences of millions of unmarried (and deeply frustrated) young men. The upward redistribution of wealth in neoliberalized countries has contributed to decades of wage stagnation and flatlined the possibility of upward mobility for many of their citizens. Demographic trends are “activity-​ dependent” on people, who, in these examples, represent the trend by their existence: being old or young, a man or woman, poor or rich. Trends can be initiated by war, disease, state/​governmental policies, technologies, shifts in values, or a combination of these kinds of intended and unintended causes. Preceding chapters have also foreshadowed another important feature of “structure” which in the DCR view is implicitly embedded in the “agent-​ structure problem,” namely that of “culture.” DCR employs the cover-​all term “social forms” as a general concept to include both social structures and culture and their respective powers of conditioning. The agent-​structure problem thus could be better conceptualized as the “agent-​social form problem,” or even more specifically, the “agent-​social structure and culture problem.” Any which way, once again, I draw on Margaret Archer and her insightful elaboration of the distinction between social structure and culture (1988, 2003; Donati and Archer 2015). In essence, culture is the complete set of ideational constructs available to people (which in this globalized and digitalized (Google Bookalized) world is historically unprecedented). The set thus forms what Archer terms the “Cultural System” (CS), which includes the “properties and powers” of all possible beliefs, values, concepts, theories, narratives, ideologies, real and imagined representations of the world, and so forth (ibid., 138). In general, “Culture as a whole is defined as referring to all intelligibilia, that is to [say,] any ‘item’ having the dispositional ability to be understood by someone—​whether or not anyone does so at a given time” (ibid., 164). The ideational features of the CS in Archer’s schema are contrasted with the “independent properties and powers of Socio-​Cultural interaction” (SC), which encompass the above sense of social structure and the various identities and positions and their relationships found within a society (ibid.). The argument here echoes the previous discussion in chapter four critiquing the ontological collapse of human agency into sociocultural agency and occupational agency or vice versa (downward or upward conflation). The present discussion, nonetheless, provides greater clarity on the ontological register of “culture” on the one hand, and “social structure” on the other. It also reiterates the necessity of distinguishing human agency (reflexivity) from both the CS and the SC in ontological terms. Foremost to the ideational contents within the CS are the “logical relations of contradiction and complementarity in the ‘systemic register’ since these impinge upon the fundamental activity of holding an idea” (2003, 26). For

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The subject of structure 179 instance, there is nothing intrinsically contradictory between the scientific worldview and political liberalism, while the scientific worldview and a political theology based on revelation are at much greater odds. Notions of patriarchy and private property are highly complementary, while patriarchy and feminism are an ongoing border war. The same logical relation of contradiction exists between realists and the many anti-​humanists DCR roundly critiques.14 The primary consequence of analyzing the CS within a society is that for any group, community, society, etc., for any shared “idea” there are going to be unshared “ideas,” and in highly differentiated and fractured societies (like the present-​day United States) the latter appear to outnumber the former. Archer notes the contrary sense of “culture,” as a unified and shared system of beliefs and practices that bind a people together, was developed in early anthropological studies of “primitive” societies, whose cultural features of kinship, religion, politics, and economy were considered coherent and unchanging. What Archer terms “the Myth of Cultural Integration” defined “culture” as a “community of shared meanings,” whereby a “community” and its “meanings” were considered to be equivalent and concurring (Donati and Archer 2015, 158–​59). Archer argues the myth arose because of the theoretical conflation of the SC and CS in the absence of their ontological differentiation. Rejecting this assumption paves the way to an analytical sensitivity toward “variations in cultural integration and their relationship to variations in social integration” (ibid., italics Donati and Archer’s). Rather than assuming “shared meanings” and “integration” are natural givens or the definition of a community, Archer argues, the “logical consistency” of ideas, pertaining to “the degree of internal compatibility between the components of [the CS],” must be examined separately from the “causal consensus” of ideas, pertaining to “the degree of social uniformity produced by the ideational influence of one set of people on another (an S.C. matter)” (ibid., 160, italics Donati and Archer’s). What is considered “right and wrong,” “true and false,” or “good and bad” as determinations of what is factual, appropriate, and/​or legitimate is negotiated or struggled over within the CS—​the hope, of course, is that true ideas prevail and real facts trump “alternative facts.” In any case, the analytical focus moves from “shared meanings” and “idealized” accounts of social institutions to the “actually existing” intrasocietal dynamics (SC) of contradiction, negotiation, and differentials of power on the one hand, in relation to the set of ideational resources (CS) that are available and employed (and sometimes weaponized) in the course of “living in a community” and its reproduction or transformation.15

The subject of relations In this chapter and in previous, I have outlined interlocking features of subjectivity that constitute its parameters. The self-​awareness of being in the world that comes with our embodiment and conscious awareness, the capacity for reflexive agency, the psychodynamics of the self, the sociocultural

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180  The subject of structure and occupational forms of agency that define our place and powers in the world, and the orientation and motivation our beliefs and desires provide, all comprise the experience of subjectivity, of being a unique subject, of having a self and a position in our relations with ourselves, other people, and the world around. In the following, I give a brief account of a recent theoretical advancement by Donati and Archer (2015) in understanding the nature of the subject and their relations that goes beyond their positioning and mapping (within a society of structures and forms) and uncovers an emergent property of interpersonal relationships (as a sense of “we-​ness”) that is the teleological value or effect of the relationship (or the “final cause” in the Aristotelian sense). Donati and Archer argue for a “relational realism” that establishes the constitution of “we-​ness,” not as essentially a set of shared and identical thoughts, values, motivations, etc. (though they could be identical in principle), but rather, on emergent relational goods brought about by the relationship. Donati and Archer write, The “ Relational Subject” refers to individual and collective social subjects in that they are “ relationally constituted”, that is, in as much as they generate emergent properties and power through their social relations. These relational good and evils have internal effects upon the subjects themselves and external effects upon their social environments. (Ibid., 31, italics Donati and Archer’s) Human relationships revolve around common values and projects and coordinated practices. People enter into relationships by accident, by choice, and by the force of law or domination. They play games and sports, have romantic relationships, get jobs, and join clubs and organizations. They are sent to work camps, forced into servitude, and date “people who are not good for me.” Human relationships generate outcomes, whether putatively positive things like children, widgets, or “good times,” or negative things like anxiety, exploitation, and death. The emergent good (or evil, as it may turn out) consequently becomes a point of focus, motivating and orientating all parties within the relationship to develop and extend the “good” by developing and extending the relationship. Conversely, when one or all parties find the relationship is generating an “evil” no amount of negotiation can resolve, they are likely to withdraw and conclude the relationship. The present state of the emergent good or evil as a “product in process” recursively conditions how and if the relationship continues. Through their reflexive deliberations, members of a relation monitor and assess the mutually generated good and their commitment to its further pursuance. Reflexivity works on two levels, at an internal level (which Archer has dubbed “the internal conversation” of reflexive monitoring of one’s values, projects, and practices) and at an external level of discussion and negotiation within a relationship. If the “good” remains a value, subjects continue with the relationship, and if evils are generated outweighing any good, they can leave. Highly

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The subject of structure 181 asymmetrical relationships involving power differentials, exploitation, and/​or domination have the consequence of a “mixed bag” of goods and evils. What is a relational good for the alpha position can be a relative evil for the beta position, but the power dynamic impedes the beta subject from extricating themselves from the relationship. This can lead the beta subject to “harmonize” the power differential through adaptive mechanisms of rationalization (“I am naturally inferior,” “I am too weak to do anything about my plight,” etc.), passive-​aggressive resistance within the relationship (common among slaves, indentured servants, and sometimes naughty children), and overt attempts overturn the asymmetry by sabotage or revolution. The relational subject, so far, has been exemplified by the types of distance-​ near, face-​to-​face relationships found in families, friendships, and employment. Donati and Archer, in addition, argue the same relational construction of the subject holds for distance-​far relationships, when actions of one subject-​ agent have positive or negative consequences—​engendering relational goods or evils—​on the livelihood of other subject-​agent(s), despite their anonymity. The reflexive orientation toward distance-​far others is predominantly an ethical consideration of the others’ relational selves. The ethical choice subjects make is to either ignore the causal linkages that constitute the relationship (to take no responsibility) or to affirm the causal linkages and reflexively consider the emergent goods and evils created by the relationship. The relational “reach” of a distance-​far relation is made possible through the mutual participation of relatively anonymous subjects within a social network (e.g., economic and political networks). Subjects have vested interests, and networks typically form around advantages (relational goods) gained by interdependency, common interests, and mutual support to advance these interests. For instance, a farmer requires consumers, a functioning market and distribution process for their products, inputs of seed, fertilizer, equipment, etc., labor, and often favorable political and economic support to make farming viable (subsidies, tariff protection from cheap imports, etc. as food production is a national security issue). While the farmer is the node point in their network, all other subject-​agents are nodes in their own. However, when each subject and their network is brought together in a larger whole—​all centered on the relational goods of “food” and/​or “profit”—​distance-​far relationships are established, and each nodal point is now related to the others through chains of cause and effect:  consumers tied to farmers via markets are tied to the agribusinesses, the hired labor, and all those involved in shaping the political economics of farming. A transformation in one node will ripple out and affect the others: consumer boycotts, labor strikes, state policy changes, agribusiness monopolization, and so forth all have the potential to affect the availability, cost, and profitability of food, so essential to human existence. In addition, once these networks become typified for most farmers and the other subject-​agents involved in the policy environment and production, transportation, and consumption of “farming products,” a relatively enduring social structure has emerged. Donati lays out this process thusly:  “societal

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182  The subject of structure structures are institutionalized social relations, which are the product of networks of relations” (ibid., 269, italics mine). These structures of sociocultural and occupational forms of agency and their material causal powers thus form out of networks and revolve around the achievement of relational goods, “good” from the standpoints or first-​person perspectives of all people within the network. This is not to say the “good” is always the most preferred or ideal. Frequently, if not most of the time, the relational good is actually “the best one can hope for in these circumstances,” or even “the lesser of two evils.” A distribution monopoly might give a farmer a choice: “sell us your crops at this price or sell nothing.” Well-​established social structures can radically curtail possibilities for achieving “better goods” than available because the structure also dictates asymmetries in power and knowledge or constraints on freedom for certain positions as they have been relationally constituted.16 Donati and Archer’s examination of the relational subject helps understand the how and why of social relationships, beyond a “we-​ness” of shared ideas, to the emergent goods entailed by the relation. The recognition of emergent evils opens the door for a deeper discussion of social problems such as “poverty, unemployment, and inequality” (ibid., 270), and the issue of ethical responsibility for “outcomes [that] are deleterious to social integration and, ultimately, human flourishing” (ibid., 319). Donati and Archer argue the attendant evils of hierarchical and asymmetrical social stations are generated because subjects are constituted within their “networks of social relations” (ibid., 321). On the contrary, ontological individualists, of course, focus on personal responsibility and capabilities—​ motivation, intelligence, education, delayed gratification, work ethic, etc.—​to explain why one person is poor, another rich, and so on. Countering the individualist ontology (and the error of ontological structuralism) is the DCR axiom that the social structures preexist individuals as the given set of potential “slots” for “raw recruits” to fill. Consequently, for instance, when deindustrialization, offshoring, robotic replacement, etc. lead to a loss of manufacturing jobs, it is not the individual being fired, it is the elimination of a once well-​paying, working-​class slot. Recent monikers of new economic trends—​the “service economy,” “symbolic labor,” or the “gig economy”—​all capture senses of changing focus and needs in the globalized system of manufacturing and finance, which has thus reshaped the array of potential slots to be filled. And while individuals with their singular levels of intelligence, work ethic, etc. attempt to navigate reflexively through and succeed (or fail) within the given socioeconomic structure, the relational goods and evils that emerge through networks of social relations are precisely determined by the ways in which the networks are bound together by internal relations constituting the system of “slot” positions. A  corporate president responsible for offshoring jobs has a relation to both the domestic worker and the foreign worker via the network of relations by cause and effect—​by constitution of the foreign worker and annihilation of the domestic. Donati and Archer go a step further and point to the neoliberal revolution undergirding the global economy and emergent evils brought about by the

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The subject of structure 183 deterritorialization of capital, the elimination of ethico-​political constraints on competition (deregulation), and the colonization of social life (health care, education, prisons, access to water, etc.) by “the logic of for-​profit enterprises” (ibid., 321). The unintended consequences of unconstrained competition for profit, exemplified by “poverty, unemployment, and inequality,” radiate out through “networks of social relations:  indeed, they are themselves social relations for which all actors, whether close at hand or distant, share, in different forms and degrees, some moral responsibility” (ibid.). And this is the high point of “the relational subject.” From Adam Smith and onward, economists have grappled with the problem of individual self-​interest in pursuit of profit and its social harms. The ethical dilemma is overcome by an appeal to a higher order: the “invisible hand of God” or the “rationality” of markets. These types of appeals to legitimize competitive capitalism, however, fail to identify the “lower-​order” reality that the subject is created by networks of social relations. One can ignore that human relations are important or absolve oneself from responsibility for relational evils because they are unintended or distance-​far in effect. But to do so is a theory-​practice inconsistency:  for subjects to ignore how their actions create goods and evils in the world is to also ignore they are constituted by their relations, largely enabling their powers in origin. To avoid the contradiction, for Donati and Archer there is a real moral injunction: “agents must reflect on the relations that condition them and on the relations that they generate” (ibid., 286). To do otherwise is “autistic economics” or psychopathic.

Summary remarks on structure and culture The emergence of social structures and other social forms (language, systems of meaning, cultural logics, and so forth) is real by virtue of the causal criterion of reality—the hallmark of ontological materialism—which grants social forms intrinsic causal powers. The ground state of the emergent causal power of social forms is ultimately a consequence of the temporal ordering of social forms and human agents. All human practices are presupposed by historically antecedent social forms. These forms emerge from agential practice, and, once materialized in aggregate (such as a demographic trend) or institutionalized (such as prescribed gender roles), they are bequeathed to future agents, becoming the conditions for subsequent social reproduction and agents’ projects and practices (which may be days, years, or generations later). Agents do not choose the time and place of their birth, and they encounter the existing social environment as an objective reality and existential fate. However, what is true for the babe remains constant through life. At any given moment all diachronic precursors leading to that moment (as chains of cause and effect) and all synchronic emergent powers in operation at the moment (of consciousness and the activity-dependence of social forms) bear on the moment, in effect creating both its possibility and an open space for reflexivity. In this way, agential practices are always implicated in the production and

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184  The subject of structure reproduction of social forms, while simultaneously, social forms are necessary prerequisites for human beings to be actually “human.” Within their milieu, agents operate as “part and parcel” of the social structures and forms, producing and reproducing social reality through the development of concerns and projects and the execution of practices in terms of making, saying, and doing.17 Social forms thus establish the material and bounded conditions (causally in terms of enablement and constraint) with which the individual interacts, be they described in terms of “culture,” “ideology,” “social structure,” “institutional reality,” or “relations of domination and exploitation.” The structural conditions of agency, however, are not “mere suggestions from the past” to guide people’s desires, projects, and practices. While social structures crucially enable intentional human agency, they also hold the power to constrain radically agential freedom and choice, through either ideological mystification or bodily discipline by external powers.18 There may be powerful social influences enforcing the reproduction of structure, such that rewards for compliance and obstacles to resistance are deeply enmeshed in society (try neither paying income and sales tax, nor recognizing the private property of others, nor respecting national border controls). There may be unconscious cultural values, ideologies, and modes of being that hold dictatorial power over consciousness and practice, akin to the Lacanian big Other or the Heideggerian notion of the “pre-​ontological” quality of Dasein.19 Indeed, as Wight notes (2006, 173), the “most durable social structures are those that lock their occupants into situations that they cannot unilaterally change” or even extricate themselves from without some level of personal cost, including death.20 The mutual constitution of social reality by the powers of agent and social forms has several notable features worth stressing. First, the concept-​and activity-​dependence of social forms on agents, and the temporal precedence of these forms to human agency, avoids the problem of “reification” of forms as existing somehow outside or separate from the projects and practices of agents and as wholly determinative of what agents think and do. At the same time, social forms are necessary for agential practice in terms of providing language, knowledge and meaning, and modalities of identity and social position (and attendant rights, duties, powers, and liabilities). The focus on social predicates and the context-​dependency of agents thus avoids the problem of “volunteerism” of agents, which is blind theoretically and ethically to the effect of social predicates on subjectivity as the real material variables responsible for human differences, especially differences of economic, political, and cultural capital because of differential access to natural and symbolic resources (water, food, energy/​education, pedigree, money, etc.).21 Second, the “reliving,” “rehearsal,” or “reconstitution” of forms through agential practice in time and place has the consequence (usually unintended) of reproducing social forms and structural relationships. Driving on a road, using a credit card, voting for leaders, buying food for dinner, turning on a light, and so on all require forms and structures (frequently interlocking) of political, economic, and cultural practices and institutions, all presupposed by language. At the same time, people do not chat with friends to reproduce the

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The subject of structure 185 English language, apply for a passport to reproduce the nation-​state system, or buy peaches to provide jobs for undocumented workers. Lastly, the temporality of structural (re)production entails the presence of a “gap” or “hiatus” existing at the center of the ontology of the social, between the moment-​by-​moment practice of agents and preexisting social structures. In the DCR view, which Roy Bhaskar terms the “transformational model of social activity,” agents either reproduce or transform existing social structures, either reinforcing the status quo or challenging its directives—​morphostasis or morphogenesis, in Archer’s parlance. As the independent ontological powers of agents and structures come into “contact” in place, agents either reproduce structures or transform them through alterations in their practice. The “key” to this process, to repeat the argument above, is “the dimension of temporality” in the “interplay” of agency and social forms, which provides the existential cut (or gap) between them and consequently justifies the independent ontological causal powers of both agency and forms (Engholm 2007, 469). The gap is precisely the open space in which agent-​subjects use the mechanism of reflexivity to sustain or alter subsequent intentions and associated practices. The contingency of practice (neither necessary nor impossible) opens social structure to the possibility of transformation, thus setting a pathway for historical change. Consequently, agents have the ontological capacity to become conscious of and reflexive on any determinants enabling or constraining their practice. These determinants can be overt, preconscious, or subconscious. As argued in chapter five in regard to Lacan, in principle, any subconscious motivation, structure of desire, or cultural mode of enframement operating (causally) through the subject can be articulated as a belief or desire at the level of consciousness and discursive knowledge (that which can be “said” by a proposition), thus allowing subject-​agents a degree of self-​determination. If brought to conscious articulation, the subject-​agent holds the unique causal power to transform existing structures—​to change their configuration and meaning—​by altering their beliefs, desires, and practice, on which structures depend for their existence.

Notes 1 The body as the criterion of identity of a human agent is relatively unproblematic and explains the attraction of methodological and ontological individualism. The body used for “identity,” however, faces interesting questions once cross-​cultural material is examined, lessening the universality of such identity. In robust patriarchal societies, for instance, the “family” is encapsulated by the borders that frame the space of authority and personal prestige of the father/​husband. The cultural codes of obligations and duties maintain that all actions by the wife and children are fully the father’s responsibility (holding authority to punish and dictate behaviors), and in a sense are part and parcel of his “agency.” Nonetheless, there remains a brute sense, even in the above example, that despite whoever holds ultimate responsibility for actions within a familial or clan structure, the children and wife(s) of a

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2

3

4

5

6

7

8

head male are capable of initiating actions, and consequently exercising agency in virtue of an intrinsic causal capacity of all subjects. To account for the distinction between the natural world and social world, in both of which human beings participate, Bhaskar argues human agency has a quality of “intentional causality” and “transformative agency” (1998, x). Be advised there is a possibility of confusion between the senses of “intentionality” as conscious aboutness and “intentional” as “having to do with intention or purpose” (Merriam-​Webster  1980). The crucial “move” here, argued in chapter three, is that the structure of consciousness (as the “aboutness” of consciousness) logically and ontologically precedes the subject-​agency’s entry into the realm of the symbolic and social as a child. As argued in chapter four, however, enculturation is required for sociocultural agency, which is the necessary condition for human agency to be “actualized,” in sociocultural and occupational modes of agency. Reflexive deliberation is the mechanism emerging from the structure of consciousness, enabling “human agency” to operate in these modes. My discussion of the Aristotelean distinction between efficient and material causation in relation to the agent-​structure problem is indebted to Paul Lewis (2000, 249–​68). Lewis’ argument does not incorporate the other two types of causation in the Aristotelian schema: “formal cause” and “final cause.” I will just note that these missing types are incorporated into a causal analysis of the production of social reality by pointing to the “formal” constitution of agents and social forms that make them what they are, and the “final” teleological motivations of agents and functional aims of social forms. Already, though implicitly, the “formal cause” of agency, subjectivity, social forms has been discussed (and more on social forms will be further elaborated below). “Final causes” have not been discussed to a large extent; however, I  will address this form of causality below in a summation of Donati and Archer’s theory of “relational subjectivity” (2015). I should add, in most general terms, the earth itself is a condition of possibility for humankind, predicated on the same stratified reality (of biology, chemistry, and physics) that human consciousness and social forms emerge from. To be a tribal shaman, for example, or a working mother, a hunter-​gatherer, a corporate manager, a Taiwanese nationalist, or even a backwoods hippie, all in all, the whole gamut of possible “subject positions” require social-​structural predicates laid down and consolidated by the previous actions of agents. For chief elisionist Anthony Giddens, “rules and resources” are the two “structural” components elided into agency. I have abstracted both components under the more general rubric of “knowledge” in its broadest sense (which includes knowledge of rules, skills, capabilities, etc.), because to activate the power of symbolic and material resources (prestige, influence, etc., and money, military force, etc.) is ultimately, in elisionist terms, a “knowledge” of the power of resources and how to use them. This point will be developed in greater detail in this section. The concept of “unconscious embodied dispositions,” if coherent and real, is an attempt to account for various behaviors and “skills” that people are unaware of, despite being constitutive of who they are and how they interact with the world around. For example, different contexts and different cultures configure “personal space” in a host of different ways. In Western societies, it would be a gross violation of personal space to have stranger put their hand in your mouth—​except in the context of a dentist’s office. In many patriarchal societies, it is acceptable if not required for a man to kiss another man on the cheek, or both cheeks, when greeting

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The subject of structure 187 one another. In the US, this is not acceptable, if not dangerous. The point is that these kinds of “dispositions” are supposedly unconscious. To echo a point made in chapter five, even if a disposition is unconscious, once transmuted into a proposition, subject-​agents become conscious of their dictates, and subsequently can accept or reject them. 9 As I  write in November 2016, shortly after Donald Trump’s historic defeat of Hillary Clinton, a neoliberal herself, it is unclear if President Trump will follow through on his populist economic program and challenge the neoliberal tenets entrenched in US economic policies on free trade. It does seem clear, however, the Republican Party’s goals of deregulation, deunionization, shrinking and privatizing the welfare state, and lowering income and corporate taxes will remain true to orthodox neoliberalism and unchanged. 10 It is worth noting that in many neoliberal societies, the ideology of radical individual freedom comes into contradiction with religio-​conservative values, a problem the “Protestant work ethic” coupled to temperance, modesty, and self-​discipline was supposed to solve, and the genie contemporary religious conservatives and neoconservatives continue to fight ardently to keep in the bottle (Bell 1996). 11 Reminder: in chapter four I renamed Archer/Wight’s forms of agency123 as human agency, sociocultural agency, and occupational agency. 12 Wight (2006, p. 218) notes that Andrew Collier (1989, 85) has proposed calling a “structured entity” such as a “building” or “molecule” a “structuratum,” reserving the concept of “structure to refer to the relations between the parts, or components, of a structuratum.” 13 The examples given are simple forms, but human societies can contain highly complex or abstract forms. For instance, the “consumer-​producer relation,” salient in the Marxist political economy, is predicated on the process by which the consumption of goods supports and reproduces the conditions of production, which enables further consumption. Each position is dependent on the other for its existence. If consumption stops, production stops, and vice-​versa, and the individuals involved are affected. Likewise for the “criminal-​victim relation,” whose subject positions are defined by norms and law and the cultural categories and logics undergirding them. Honor killings, genital mutilation, and infanticide (to give extreme examples) may not be considered to have a “victim” within a society, and hence no criminal. Recent strains of political correctness have sought to “criminalize” (or at least problematize) microaggression, hate speech, and causing emotional discomfort. As well, there is political movement to expand the category of potential “victimhood” to the natural world, giving flora and fauna “rights” that can be violated by criminal acts. 14 An interesting and politically poignant debate concerns whether or not Christianity is complementary to or contradictory to laissez-​faire capitalism. Conservative Protestants typically see them as complementary, while many Catholics (including Pope Francis) are much more critical, and support policies to rectify the effects of poverty, environmental degradation, and materialism, seen as consequences of unchecked capitalist growth. 15 Social analysis and research, as well, may discover external sources of influence and effects at both the CS and SC strata within a community—​such as acts of containment, domination, or influence-​seeking: by Western powers in the age of colonialism, from exchanges with other “cultures,” support of local proxies by external powers, embargoes and blockades, or even propaganda leaflets dropped from the sky.

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188  The subject of structure 16 The permutations and implications of examining relationships in terms of emergent relational goods and evils are far beyond the scope of this book. However, to give several examples of potential leads, consider the way sadomasochistic relations invert what is normally a “good” and “evil” in the pursuit of pleasure; or political debates over economic growth as an unproblematic relational good in the world; or when relational “goods” become reified as cultural ideals (objets petits a) and enter into the CS, becoming essential, in our late modernity, to consumer marketing strategies tying “goods” to a “lifestyle” and personal and “tribal identities”—​inverting the causal relationship with the attempt to buy a sense of self rather than relationally constituting the “goods” of a “lifestyle” and one’s identities; and lastly, the importance of “exchange” (through trade, gifts, and commodities) as a primordial and ubiquitous relational good. Our farmer sells their crop to a wholesaler, who sells it a supermarket chain, who sells it to consumers. The first two transactions, going from farmer to supermarket, have profit as the vested interest that motivates the exchange. In the third, from supermarket to consumer, there are two vested interests: profit and food to eat, motivating the one person to open a store and the other to shop. What these examples show is that the notion of a relational good, and the subject so constituted by relations, can be broadened to include the relational goods that are generated from relations of self to self, self to other, and self to world. 17 The argument for necessary social prerequisites for praxis has some overlap with Lacan’s theory of the big Other. The primary difference between the two resides in how they theorize the formation of the subject. As discussed in chapter five, for Lacan, the subject is wholly formed by its internal relations to the social field through language. DCR, on the other hand, argues the subject has an intrinsic reflexive capability that enables the possible disruption of the constitutive powers of the social field to follow its staid course as supported by defenders (other agents) of the status quo. The main point to is to acknowledge that powerful forces operate to shape the subject. Society, culture, ideology, discourse are among the usual suspects, theorized as abstract and passive forces of inculcation to some form of lifeworld or system of domination. 18 For example, cultural logics frequently engender social hierarchies and social formations as necessary according to God, Reason, and/​or Nature. Women in highly patriarchal societies may wholeheartedly believe they are politically and economically subordinate to men. Members of lower castes may believe they are “metaphysically” inferior to higher-​caste members. Evangelical Christians in the United States may believe their desires are manipulated by Satan. A fair number of people believe capitalism is grounded in the natural laws of human nature. More conspicuous forms of repression “subject” agency by mechanics of power in service to the interests of elite agents: the state, capital, cartels, and mafias make use of prisons, concentration camps, asylums, military interventions; access to income, credit, and goods; and monopolized/​extralegal violence. 19 As noted in chapter four, for Heidegger, Dasein holds a “preontological understanding of Being” as a set of sociocultural aspects that are inculcated through a child’s development and are not available to conscious examination, critique, or modification (cf. Dreyfus 1991). In my mind there are “structural” similarities between Heidegger’s a priori ontology of the subject as Dasein and Lacan’s concept of the fundamental fantasy and big Other. Whereas Lacan is at most ambivalent about the power of psychotherapy to help an analysand come

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The subject of structure 189 to terms with their “structure of desire” as shaped by fantasy and the big Other—​ making conscious what is covered—​Heidegger is more radical. Heidegger argues there is no epistemological vantage to to expose a reality outside of Dasein (or would it only be a pre-​Dasein Dasein?), thus rendering the attempt at “universal and true” philosophical/​theoretical speculation merely an elaboration of our Dasein, namely, our “Western” preontological cultural logic embedded in space (e.g., Germany, England, America) and time (e.g., 19th, 20th, 21st centuries), where-​and whenever we “thinkers” may happen to reside. As I discussed in chapter four, I agree with Searle’s argument that along with Dasein, all “phenomenological operators” give rise to a “phenomenological illusion.” Object is collapsed into subject, giving the illusion that what we take to be “real and true” is prefigured as such by a pre-​existing interpretative grid of intelligibility and meaning. Like Foucault’s notion of a “discursive regime,” Heidegger’s Dasein appears to me to be an obscure version of the culture concept, though highly deterministic for “insiders” and highly unfathomable to “outsiders.” It is unproblematic to note that all human beings are embedded in culture(s) and this “existential condition” largely accounts for the variety of meanings, institutions, and practices found in the world. When faced with different ways of being human, there can be challenges to interpreting what other people are doing, saying, and making and understanding why. The DCR focus on causal powers helps cut through this problem. A researcher might not fully understand a “foreign” conceptual field, because of cultural or philosophical biases and perspectives. However, the focus on causality is the attempt to “spot weld” analysis and interpretation to what is actual and therefore to what is real. 20 For instance, a conscientious objector might resign from the military to protest a war, but their position in rank and their accompanying responsibilities will be immediately taken over by somebody else. Likewise, an environmentalist might decide to live “off the grid” to lessen their carbon footprint out of concern for global climate change but in effect make no substantive change in the earth’s climate. More saliently, an individual black slave in the antebellum South could not unilaterally end slavery, nor disengage from their forced servitude without significant personal danger. The problem is that unique individual actions have little effect on structures unless a sufficient number of people change their behavior, and powerful forces may work actively to maintain the status quo of social-​structure configurations, even with widespread political agitation. While the early 20th-​century suffrage movement and the civil rights movement in the mid-​20th century resulted in the right to vote for previously marginalized groups, the World Trade Organization “Battle in Seattle” in 1999, worldwide protests against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011 had little effect to alter existing financial and geopolitical structures of  power. 21 In Western societies, consider the following social formations (in no particular order) in terms of sets of practices shaped by their particular historical and geographical settings: occupation, family, consumption, recreation, citizenship, home ownership, and worship. When we are born into a particular milieu, these types of social formations preexist our point of historical entry, and through them we are socialized and enculturated. It is precisely these structures that are responsible for the human differences we associate with various modes of identity—​national, ethnic, class, religious, etc. —​and their respective sets of practices. For example, being born to Jewish parents in Czarist Russia at the end of the 19th century will inevitably

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190  The subject of structure be different than being born to white, Protestant parents in Seattle, Washington in the early 1970s. While the basic patterns of these practices have endured (we still—​ mostly—​work and recreate, have sexual relations, raise families, own homes, and so on), radical changes have also occurred for better or for worse, brought about by wars, technological development, changing values and mores, and demographics, among a long list of possible influences. At certain points, some not too long ago, who would have thought women would vote, gays would get married and adopt children, spotted owls would interfere with the freedom to log, the world would grow obese, and Protestantism would no longer be the majority religion in the US?

Bibliography Archer, Margaret. 1988. Culture and Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, Margaret. 1995. Realist Social Theory:  The Morphogentic Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, Margaret. 1998. “Introduction:  Realism in the Social Sciences.” In Critical Realism:  Essential Readings. Edited by Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson, and Alan Norrie. New York: Routledge. Archer, Margaret. 2003. Structure, Agency, and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, Margaret. 2007. “The Ontological Status of Subjectivity: The Missing Link Between Structure and Agency.” In Contributions to Social Ontology. Edited by Clive Lawson, John Latsis, and Nuno Martins. New York: Routledge. Bell, Daniel. 1996. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Bhaskar, Roy. 1998. The Possibility of Naturalism:  A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. New York: Routledge. Bonjour, Lawrence. 1985. The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Collier, Andrew. 1989. Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought. Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Cowen, Tyler. 2011. The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-​Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. New York: Dutton. Craib, Ian. 1992. Anthony Giddens. London: Routledge. Donati, Pierpaolo, and Margaret S. Archer. 2015. The Relational Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1991. Being-​in-​the-​World:  A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Engholm, Par. 2007. “TMSA (Transformational Model of Social Activity).” In Dictionary of Critical Realism. Edited by Mervyn Hartwig. New York: Routledge. Krugman, Paul. 1994. Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, Paul. 2000. “Realism, Causality, and the Problem of Social Structure.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 30(3): 249–​68. Merriam-​Webster. 1980. Webster’s New World Dictionary, Second Edition. Springfield, MA: Merriam-​Webster. Wight, Colin. 2006. Agents, Structures, and International Relations:  Politics as Ontology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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7  Social ontology

Introduction The contention that social structures have emergent causal powers, as argued in chapter two, qualifies these structures as ontologically real—​neither reducible to nor epiphenomenal of lower-​level operations in nature. In the social world, the ontological question revolves around the nature of social reality for all peoples in all times pertaining to language, meaning, institutions, and the built environment. The key parameter of social ontology is its focus on all things dependent on conscious intentionality and intersubjectivity for their existence. Natural objects and structures (like trees, rocks, and the human body) do not owe their existence to human intentional activity, while 100-​ dollar bills, India’s caste system, and ideas about the human body do. As such, to give an account of social ontology is to model and pinpoint the mechanisms in operation that are causally responsible for creating social reality. Moreover, while most socially created things are not “space-​time invariant” (as, say, the laws of physics and chemistry appear to be), they are legitimate objects of study for research and substantive theory-​building when “relatively enduring” in a society over a given time and across a place.1 To take a step back, social ontology is a subfield of the more general philosophical conception of ontology as a branch of metaphysics concerned with the question of “being” of all things existent within reality (quarks, love and hate, chihuahuas, chairs, planets, universe(s), a belief in ancestor spirits, and so forth). Ontology seeks to understand the generative principles accounting for the extension of being against the backdrop of non-​being, including inquiry into what appears to be its basic features: its coordinates of time and space location, the nature of causality and change within being. In addition, general ontological questions include speculation on the modes and categories of being, the qualities of being, and what necessary and sufficient conditions presuppose being. Consequently, and in accord with the stratified nature of reality, general ontological questions (and answers) presuppose social ontological ones. DCR argues that social forms are activity-​and concept-​ dependent, through actions that include thinking, speaking, reading, doing, making,

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192  Social ontology and other forms of practice. At the same time, social forms provide necessary powers that enable action. In this chapter I explicate John Searle’s argument that status function Declarations create desire-​independent reasons for action. Searle’s argument is explicitly ontological, and, to translate Searle’s point into DCR concepts, Searle is arguing that a status function Declaration (or Declaration for short) is the generative mechanism by which human beings create their institutional reality. The essential feature of the reality human beings compose are desire-​independent reasons for action that characterize deontological powers, such as rights, duties, obligations, and powers of authority—​which are the bonds that connect people in society, whether in friendship and romance or by contract and servitude. In broadest terms, Searle identifies the ontology of deontology.2 However, I  think Searle’s argument can be extended beyond his initial purview. Not only do Declarations create deontological powers, they create what might be called desire-​independent conditions for action. Declarations create social forms—​foremost language—​as well as the further capacity to create cultural systems (as described in chapter six) and the deontological powers that constitute the subject in all their relations in terms of structural relations. To return to the language of DCR, the logic of Declarations is the mechanism by which the powers of enablement and constraint are generated, and it resolves how the concept-​and activity-​dependence of social forms and desire-​independent reasons for action manifest enduring social forms as the conditions and material cause of human social reality. In this sense, language is the first desire-​independent condition for action because language conventions for any particular language are not arbitrary—​the force of language conventions is the material cause that enables a subject-​agent (efficient cause) to convey meaning from one speaker to another. Language thus enables and constrains the subject to speak. The striking overlap between Searle and DCR arises because of their explicit concern with social ontology and the way in which the social institutions and cultural systems redound to the subject-​agent in terms of enablement and constraint or desire-​independent reasons (and conditions) for action. Despite their theoretical homology, I  believe they are both philosophically autochthonous developments, whose convergence signifies to me that philosophy and social science is maturing, and that we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift toward a much greater appreciation of the intrinsic capacities of human being in relation to the social constitution of human being, especially by transcending the limitations and obfuscations of the empiricist and anti-​humanist traditions—​targeted by both DCR and Searle. Searle’s interest in a “general ontology of social reality” is grounded in a theory of the prelinguistic structure of conscious intentionality, language, and collective intentionality while resting on the distinction between “observer-​ independent” and “observer-​ dependent” features of reality, which should remind us of the DCR distinction between the intransitive and transitive dimensions of reality. Observer-​dependent entities in

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Social ontology 193 the world require human conscious intentionality for their existence and are the focus of social ontological inquiry. Like DCR’s provision of the real, emergent powers materialism of reflexivity and social forms, Searle also relies on a similar footing, which he specifies as the unified conscious field discussed in chapter two and the structure of prelinguistic consciousness to be discussed below. The overlap is not surprising. Separating out what is intransitive/​observer-​independent from what is transitive/​observer-​ dependent is necessary to avoid an ontological collapse and resultant confusion over the type of causal powers each “side of the story” holds. Like DCR, for Searle the crucial operation is to ground “observer-​dependent” entities in “observer-​independent entities” such that the higher-​order capacities flow both causally and logically from lower-​level capacities, ultimately a biological basis for cognition, reflexivity, language, and the human capacity to make Declarations.

Searlean social ontology The preceding sections have sought to explain the transcendental logic of the agent-​structure relationship. The existence of social forms, of language, institutions, social positions, identities, and so forth, however, has been largely assumed as given. A  further step is required to complete the DCR social ontology, while remaining at a level that accounts for the transhistorical and transcultural properties of social life, or in other words, the generic or “universal” processes that are causally responsible for social processes, institutions, meaning, and value—​granted they are shared and accepted within a community. As ontology proper is a branch of metaphysics concerned with “knowledge of being,” social ontology is concerned with “knowledge of social being.” It is profoundly imbricated into human “being” in all instances of concrete people on earth doing, saying, and making their social world. The primary concern of social ontology is the nature of “institutions” in the broad and inclusive sense of organizations, customs, practices, laws, and the meanings, values, and principles that they organize. I  have found John Searle’s work on social ontology insightful because he has discovered the logical structure of the mechanism by which social forms are created and maintained. I think Searle’s work is fully compatible with DCR social theory and both interlock into a greater (emergent) understanding of society. Searle’s argument is both deep ontologically, because of his grounding of the social in the prelinguistic structure of consciousness, and wide because a basic mechanism is responsible for all social reality. Searle is very much a theory builder, starting with basic premises and working upward to explain how all social reality can be understood by a basic logic. In order to recount Searle’s work in light of its complexity, I  will first give an overview of the basic themes to orientate a later step-​by-​step examination of how he links the prelinguistic structure of consciousness to language and finally to the emergence of social forms.

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Introduction to major themes John Searle’s work (2010, ix) focuses on the “fundamental nature” and “mode of existence” of human social institutional reality as a “general theory of social ontology,” to discover the logical structure underlying such things as “nation-​states, money, corporations, ski clubs, cocktail parties, and football games.” In a move similar to DCR’s theory of ontological stratification, for Searle, social ontology is concerned with “social facts” or “institutional facts,” which are unilaterally dependent on basic powers of physics, chemistry, biology, and human consciousness. Institutional facts contrast with “brute facts” or “basic facts” to highlight the existential nature of facts independent of human intentionality (and volition), such as physical, chemical, and biological states of nature, and those social facts dependent on human intentionality, which are “typically objective facts, but oddly enough, they are only facts by human agreement or acceptance” and as such “require institutions for their existence” (ibid., 10). For Searle (ibid., 4), the “two most fundamental sets of basic facts are the atomic theory of matter and the evolutionary theory of biology,” on which human “mental life depends,” and consequently which social ontological claims must respect because “collective mental phenomena…are themselves dependent on and derived from the mental phenomena of individuals.” The focus on “collective mental phenomena” or what Searle terms “collective intentionality” is the basis for social reality because it is shared, intersubjective, and dependent on at least two people. It is centered on the capacity for language and symbolic exchange, and is integral to the philosophical anthropology this book develops. It is also, as demonstrated above, emergent because of the causal powers criterion for reality. Searle argues (ibid., 5) the question of collective intentionality and social ontology grounds a “legitimate branch of philosophy” and inaugurates “the philosophy of society,” which analytically precedes the related fields of “philosophy of social science” and “social philosophy.” The philosophy of society asks the essential basic question, the ontological question pertaining to the nature of existence of the primary units of analysis (society and the social) other branches of philosophy and social theory, more often than not, assume as given. Searle argues (ibid., 6) the dearth of social ontological speculation within Western philosophy over the past century (and beyond) follows from the dominance of epistemic considerations in the face of skepticism toward knowledge. Searle’s return to ontological considerations is developed through his employment of “conditions of satisfaction,” which uncovers, in one instance, the logical structure of a belief, and moves away from trying to justify the content of a belief (such as whether or not a belief the sun will rise tomorrow is justified and true). The return to ontology inverts the epistemic motivation of skepticism, asking not if the process of acquiring knowledge is valid, but rather refocusing attention to the world around, outside of whatever knowledge humans may hold of it. Even though it is a subtle shift, the focus of

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Social ontology 195 inquiry is on the conditions that make a belief true or false, and not on the process of justification. This move shifts the priority of ontology over epistemology, and thus spotlights the processes responsible for the world around us—​what it is and how it became like it is. Moreover, except for dwindling pockets of hard cultural relativism and the nihilistic solipsism of relativism’s endgame, it is no longer viable to question radically the progressive knowledge gains in the natural and social world brought about by sustained human inquiry across all disciplines (including the humanities). Mistaken knowledge is tamed by the force of reality. The transcendental argument justifying the legitimacy of ontological speculation opens the door for Searle’s argument. Moving on from epistemology, Searle seeks the causal mechanism responsible for social reality, and hence, a social ontology. In his view, Searle argues (ibid., 6), “society has a logical (conceptual, propositional) structure that admits of, indeed requires, logical analysis.” Searle’s advance is to show how the vast range and complexity of human institutions in virtue of cultural and historical variations among them has “an underlying commonality” in the form of a “linguistic mechanism,” precisely because “it seems…implausible to suppose that we would use a series of logically independent mechanisms for creating institutional facts” (ibid., 6–​7). The nature of the “single mechanism” causally responsible for institutional facts, according to Searle, is foremost grounded in the capacity of people to impose “status functions” on: Objects and people where the objects and the people cannot perform the functions solely in virtue of their physical structure. The performance of the function requires that there be a collectively recognized status that the person or object has, and it is only in virtue of that status that the person or object can perform the function in question. (Ibid., 7)3 Consequently, through collective intentions, people impose status functions on things, people, and contexts: a parcel of land is transposed into “private property”; marijuana is legalized in Washington state; a piece of paper is transposed into a “20-​dollar bill”; and Donald Trump is recognized as the “President of the United States.” In these examples, the person or object in a designated context is transformed by the assignment of a particular status, with the essential requirement there is “collective acceptance or recognition of the object or person as having that status” (ibid., 8). Searle points out (ibid.), however, “recognition” does not mean everybody or perhaps anybody must approve of the status functions of an institution: “hatred, apathy, and even despair are consistent with the recognition of that which one hates, is apathetic toward, and despairs of changing.” The intersubjective basis and collective acceptance of a status function only depends on the fact (indebted to the human biological/​psychosocial constitution) that humankind “can cooperate not only in the actions that they perform, but they can even have

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196  Social ontology shared attitudes, shared desires, and shared beliefs” (ibid.). And it is through the force of these shared “collective intentionalities” human beings create a social world. The distinctive and essential property of a status function is its deontic power(s). Deontology, a branch of philosophy of ethics concerned with the nature of rights and duties, is recast as an anthropological category covering, in Searle’s words (ibid., 9), all instances of “rights, duties, obligations, requirements, permissions, authorizations, entitlements,” and, I  would add, powers, disempowerments, liabilities, and meanings. In both positive and negative senses, persons and objects are endowed with deontic powers granted by a status function assignment through collective intentionality. These powers are the basis for sociocultural and occupational forms of agency, discussed in chapter four:  mothers and fathers, police officers and judges, minorities and “native speakers.” Status assignment by collective intentionality gives the Christian cross the significance of salvation and makes the bull the sign of growing markets. Deontic powers often give the holder powers to do and, simultaneously, duties to be done. Owning a piece of land, considered as private property, entitles the owner to certain rights of determination over how the property can be developed; at the same time, the owner has a liability to pay property taxes. Twenty dollars in the pocket enfranchises purchasing power, but not the power to buy illegal goods and services. President Donald Trump has the right to direct American foreign policy; at the same time, he is obligated to defend the US Constitution. On a more abstract level, deontic powers are central to politico-​philosophical debates over the reality of inherent (or God-​given for some) deontic powers, expressed in various ideologies such as “universal rights of man,” “human rights,” and “natural rights.” Searle, in addition, notes (ibid., 9) deontic powers are frequently either “conditional” and/​or “disjunctive.” The acquisition of conditional powers follows from a personal choice or an externally sourced authorization of the power. Choosing to have children immediately enmeshes the parent in a host of pertinent rights and responsibilities. The ability of medical doctors to prescribe drugs is conditional on their medical board certification. Disjunctive powers are exclusive of other potential powers: to attain deontological powers in one domain axiomatically excludes having powers in another. A  person cannot simultaneously be the President of the US and a member of Congress, or a Catholic priest and married, and many countries do not allow dual citizenship. The current political flareup over the rights of the LGBTQ community is precisely over the deontological right (or not) to self-​determine one’s gender and sexuality as the condition of being treated as a man or woman, gay or straight, or some amalgam. The deontological right under question—​to make use of gendered spaces (public restrooms, etc.), and to have legally supported expectations for respectful recognition of one’s identity—​would be conditional on the prior choice. These choices, at the same time, are disjunctive in that one cannot

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Social ontology 197 choose to be a man one day and a woman the next. Bisexual people cannot be bigamists, marrying both a man and a woman at the same time, having two households, raising two families. The process by which collective intentionality creates deontic powers through the assignment of status functions to people and things relies on a basic mechanism, what philosophers term a “constitutive rule.” As Searle notes (ibid., 9–​10), there are two basic kinds of rule systems, “regulative” and “constitutive.” Regulative rules are ubiquitous and typically coordinate and standardize “antecedently existing forms of behavior” (ibid., 9). Whether drivers are required to drive on the left side or right side of the road, using Searle’s example (ibid., 10), is regulative of the act of driving, which “can exist independently of [either] rule.” Most statutes, ordinances, laws, regulations, rules of etiquette, etc. effectively “regulate” people’s behavior. The key property of a regulative rule is the identification of an existing behavior, for which post hoc rules are developed to modify behavior, like a curfew, a daily ATM cash withdrawal limit, or an obligation to ‘behave in a courteous manner’—​in effect, a “do X” (ibid.). Constitutive rules, in contrast, are essential to the action in question, non-​arbitrary, and effectively create conditions of “possibility of the very behavior that they regulate” (ibid.). The classic example of how constitutive rules create a reality is the game of chess, in which the rules create the game. Any change in the rules would change the game because “chess” does not exist independently from or antecedently to the rules that dictate that chess has a 64-​field board and 16 pieces on each side, a checkmate wins the game, etc. The underlying “form” of a constitutive rule is “X counts as Y in context C,” whereby “X” is given a status function to “count as Y” within a localized, bounded, and/​or determined “context C” (ibid.). In chess, “such and such counts as a legal knight move in a game of chess” (ibid.). The same form underlies all manner of social facts: “a touch down in a football game, a stock market transaction, a cocktail party, private property, and the adjournment of a meeting are all examples of status functions that are brought into existence by constitutive rules” (ibid.). The anthropological question concerns the purpose behind forming a status function by a constitutive rule. For instance, constitutive rules of a game (chess, soccer, road marathons) channel the pleasure of the competitive spirit through the goal of winning the game; and cocktail parties channel goals of sociality and networking—​all fairly straightforward aims. Games and parties exist, and people can “make use of ” or “participate” in them for a range of personal motivations. This secondary level of personal interests (in psychodynamic and social terms, from pathological to benign) motivates the agent to play a game of chess or attend a party. While the choice to play chess is relatively free, there are a host of institutional realities in which participation is much less optional, if not obligatory. The constitutive rules underlying economic, political, and social institutions (private property, government, and gender norms, for example) create highly complex social forms, which always include relations of power, conflict, and mediation. To be a citizen, to have a

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198  Social ontology job, and to have social relations necessarily involves unavoidable immersion in institutional realities, forcing one to “play the game.” The social ontological import of constitutive rules cannot be understated. However, the capacity to employ constitutive rules by which human beings create their social world is dependent on (1)  the prelinguistic structure of consciousness, and (2)  the basic logical and conceptual functioning of language. I  will postpone discussing the role of prelinguistic intentionality for the moment, and segue to the second point. Searle argues language provides the template for higher-​order institutions because of inherent deontological commitments internal to speech acts. Language is the first institution, and gives rise to other institutions. As language is a fundamental capacity and sine qua non of human being, Searle is able to make a transhistorical and transcultural (universal) truth claim that is, in the words of Alain Badiou, “indifferent to differences” (2007, xii). Status function Declarations are thus the constitutive rules forming social institutional reality, whose ultimate grounding is found in the logic of language (or more specifically, of “speech acts”), which grants human beings the power, or, perhaps better, reflects their power to describe and prescribe features of reality. In Searle’s recourse to a language foundation for institutions, he makes a basic distinction between speech acts that purport to describe the world as it is, in the form of propositions stating beliefs, and knowledge claims and speech acts that try to change the world from where it is, such as a request. The former Searle defines (ibid., 11) as having a “word-​to-​world direction of fit,” such that the propositional contents conform to the world with the supposition that, by definition, they are honestly held and “true or false depending on the extent to which they do successfully represent how things are in the world.” The latter kinds of speech acts have a “world-​to-​word direction of fit,” and “are trying to change the world to match the content of the speech act” (ibid.). Commands “aimed at causing obedience,” speech acts reflecting people’s wants, needs, and desires to change the world in minor (and major) ways, are all designed and intended to bring about change and hence bring the world into alignment with the speech act (ibid., 12). With these two forms in mind, Searle argues: [A]‌fascinating class of speech acts…combine the word-​to-​world and the world-​to-​word direction of fit simultaneously in a single speech act. These are cases where we change reality to match the propositional content of the speech act and thus achieve world-​to-​word direction of fit…and…we succeed in so doing because we represent the reality as being so changed. (Ibid.) These “world-​creating” speech acts are Declarations, where “you make something the case by explicitly saying that it is the case” (ibid.). Searle writes, “with the important exception of language itself, all of institutional reality, and therefore, in a sense all of human civilization, is created by speech acts

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Social ontology 199 that have the same logical form as Declaration” (ibid., 12–​13, italics mine). An order to “leave the room” has the quality of a desire for the subordinate to leave the room (world-​to-​word direction of fit); at the same time it has the quality of a belief (held by both commander and subordinate) that it is the case an order has been given (word-​to-​world direction of fit). The order has created a new reality, a new institutional fact by Declaration. This basic logic is the template and generative mechanism human beings use to create social reality, including the essential components of subjectivity, that is, sociocultural and occupational forms of agency found in all geohistorical milieus. Searle points out, and this is a point that causes significant confusion among Searle’s critics, that not all constitutive events of institutional reality are strict and formal Declarations. The underlying logic of a Declaration is in effect, but “sometimes we just linguistically treat or describe, or refer to, or talk about, or even think about an object in a way that creates a reality by representing that reality as created” (ibid., 13). The logic of the “double direction of fit” manifests reality despite there being no explicit “Declarational speech act” because the creative power of the logic of Declarations is taken for granted and unconsciously replicated (ibid.). Searle’s goal to explain a broad range of social phenomena by the singular concept of status function assignment is thus to discover the underlying logical form of the operation. And it should be pointed out, while deontic powers are always discoverable social facts, the underlying processual logic of a collective intention to establish a status function (as a mechanism, and qualifying as “real” in the DCR view of causal powers) is not necessarily (if not infrequently) phenomenologically or empirically available to the researcher. Nonetheless, the effects of the formal logic of Declarations are fully manifest. Searle takes the underlying logic of the linguistic form of a Declaration and its double direction of fit, and generalizes the logic as a mechanism he calls a “Status Function Declaration,” which is the ontological foundation in the “creation and maintenance” of “human institutional reality.” Once in place and generally accepted, “constitutive rules of the form ‘X counts as Y in C’ ” become “standing Declarations,” which are relatively enduring rules “applied in individual cases where there need to be no separate act of acceptance or recognition because the recognition is already implicit in the acceptance of the rule” (ibid., italics Searle’s). Winning the electoral college in a presidential election or achieving a checkmate in chess are achieved by means of standing Declarations, and voters in a US election or participants in a chess world championship recognize (however grudgingly) legitimate “wins” under the decree of the US Constitution and the rules of chess. This recognition is built into the process of determining who wins because “acceptance of the constitutive rule…is sufficient to commit the participants in the institution to accepting that anybody who satisfies such and such a condition is president-​ elect” or a chess grandmaster (ibid.). Searle’s argument—​that collective intentionality uses the logic of status function Declarations to create an institutional reality of deontic powers by

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200  Social ontology constitutive rules—​rests on a lower-​level (emergent) power granted by linguistic and/​or symbolic representation. However, a potential problem arises in Searle’s account because language and symbols are institutional facts (in the sense of “X counts as Y in C”: the English word “dog” counts as a canis lupus familiaris in the context of the English language and kingdom animalia). It would appear the institution of language used to create “higher-​order” social institutions requires its own process of collective intentions, status function Declarations, and so on, leading to an infinite regress. Searle argues on the contrary (ibid., 14)  that linguistic facts (as opposed to social facts), of the type that “an utterance counts as a statement or a promise, are not facts where the semantics goes beyond the semantics” because “semantics is sufficient to account for the existence of the statement or the promise” (ibid.). The power of the semantic form cannot in itself “make money or private property, but the semantic content of the speech act by itself is sufficient to make statements, promises, requests, and questions” (ibid., italics mine). The semantic power of language to represent meaning (in speech acts) is self-​sufficient to constitute that meaning and halts a potential regress. This is Searle’s key ontological argument to understand the formation of institutional reality as the basis of social ontology. In Searle’s view, the importance of language as an institution (the master institution) stems from its self-​sufficiency from prior Declarations, while it simultaneously (in DCR-​speak) is the emergence basis for a higher institutional reality of social forms created by Declarations. Searle’s case for a non-​ reductive “biological naturalism” and “first-​person ontology of consciousness” (discussed in chapter three) sets the stage for his understanding of language and the structure of consciousness. Searle argues (ibid., 61) “language [is] an extension of biologically basic, prelinguistic forms of intentionality,” and, as emergent capacity, language following from prelinguistic forms of intentionality is a key mechanism that explains how the social is a “natural outgrowth of more fundamental—​physical, chemical, and biological—​phenomena.” Searle’s argument flies in the face of much contemporary philosophical and social-​theoretical reasoning. He argues (ibid.) against two deeply held and widespread errors:  the first is treating language “as the primary form of intentionality”; and the second is not putting language front and center in theories of social ontology. In general, political and social theory, “from Aristotle through Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel to Habermas, Bourdieu, and Foucault…take language for granted.” Moreover, despite the fact language is an explicit component in Habermasian, Bourdieusian, and Foucauldian philosophy (communicative action, habitus, and discursive formations, respectively), in Searle’s reading (ibid., 62), all three ontologize language as central to social reality, without giving an account of “what language is.” The failure to account for language has a negative consequence for each theorist’s resolution of the agent-​structure problem.4 Likewise, social contract theorists are especially guilty of assuming language as always already given. Social contract theory ontologizes human society in a “state of nature,” and then attempts

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Social ontology 201 to draw politico-​legal implications from the “nature of humans in nature.” Searle points out (ibid.) the essential problem with social contract theory: “if by ‘state of nature’ is meant a state in which there are no human institutions, then for language-​speaking animals, there is no such thing as a state of nature” (italics Searle’s). This is a consequence of the fact “that once you have a shared language you already have a social contract; indeed, you already have society” (ibid.). Social and political philosophy and theory cannot incorporate or assume “language” as a given without giving an account of “what language is” (ibid.). The takeaway is language is essential to philosophical anthropology. Without presupposing the causal basis of language as an emergent capacity, grounded in a stratified natural reality and prelinguistic forms of intentionality, this error inevitably leads to ontological error and confusion: “false-​bottom” philosophy and social theory. While language is an institution, it differs from all other human institutions because the latter are unilaterally dependent on language. Cultures and communities can exist without many kinds of institutions such as “governments, private property, or money” (ibid., 62). However, “you cannot have a society that has government, private property, or money, but does not have a language” (ibid.). Searle notes (ibid.) this is not a controversial logical relationship between language and social institutions; however, it is a “philosophically important task…to say exactly why it is true.” And to repeat, it is through the “logico-​linguistic operation” of a status function Declaration the capacity for language enables the capacity to create social institutions (ibid.). Moreover, Searle argues (ibid.) that it is “inevitable,” once a shared language is in place in virtue of the Declaration of X counts for Y in C, “that you will get nonlinguistic institutional facts” because the logic of representation is given by language and is easily extended to institutional status functions. It is through the imposition of meaning that human beings “create a reality that goes beyond meaning” (ibid., 65). The preceding summary of Searle’s social ontology gives a sense of his ambitious project. In the following sections, I unpack his argument in finer detail, focusing on the relationships between the prelinguistic structure of consciousness, language, and institutional reality of social forms. My explication of Searle’s social ontology seeks to enrich DCR social theory at the same time, to uncover in more precise terms how subject-​agents interlock with social forms, toward a better understanding of the agent-​structure relationship.

The general structure of intentionality The starting point for Searle’s social ontology is the identification of the “general structure of consciousness,” which provides a pan-​human basis for collective intentionality and the social-​world-​creating capacity of status function Declarations (ibid., 38). The general structure is composed of prelinguistic and linguistic dimensions, with the former presupposing the possibility of the latter. Searle conceives the prelinguistic structure of consciousness,

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202  Social ontology understood in terms of a theory of intentionality, which he argues is “the essential prerequisite for understanding social ontology” (ibid., 26). The philosophical concept of “intentionality” refers to the observation that consciousness is a “capacity of the mind by which it is directed at, or about, objects and states of affairs in the world” (ibid., 25). Conscious intentionality is distinguished from the “ordinary sense” of an intention to plan to do something (e.g., cook a meal, get married one day, or look for a job). Searle notes (ibid.) the English-​language translation of “intentionality” and “intention” from their German-​language word sources gives rise to the easy confusion. The two concepts, however, distinguish that the act of intending is thus “just one type of intentional state among many others such as belief, desire, hope, and fear” (ibid., italics mine). In more general terms, the recurring “aboutness” of conscious intentionality toward the world can be divided by its referral to either “cognition” or “volition,” both of which designate two different modes of conscious intentionality in the relation between the interior “mind” and exterior “world.” Cognition is composed of acts or states of perception (what people see), memory (what people remember), and belief (what people think is true about the world). These three modes of cognition are the forms that underlie the “downward” or “mind-​to-​world direction of fit.” In all these modes, the mind seeks to “fit” the world. Perceptions, memories, and beliefs have a general truth condition that bridges the mind-​to-​world that comes about when the mind “matches, or fits, or accurately represents the world” (ibid., 26–​27). The crucial realist linkage in this function is that what is perceived, remembered, and believed is true insofar as the objects that are perceived, memories that are remembered, and beliefs that are believed are true or correct. For the latter, “the aim of a belief is to be true, and it fails if it is false” (ibid., 27). Likewise for perceptions and memories: if Searle remembers leaving his car keys on his desk and he actually left them in his jacket pocket, the aim of a memory to represent accurately the past has failed its truth condition. The aim of perception is to perceive the state of reality, and the truth condition is met when agents accurately see what is to be seen (whether a person sees a glass half-​full or half-​empty is another story). If Searle sees his keys on his desk, the truth condition is met if indeed his keys are on his desk and not a hologram or hallucination. It is the opposite case with volition. In this mode, the world is sought to “fit” the mind. Human intentions and desires “are not supposed to represent how the world is but how we would like it to be (in the case of desires) or how we intend to make it be (in the case of intentions)” (ibid., 28). In Searle’s terms, the logical structure of volition has the “upward” or “world-​to-​mind” direction of fit. Volition as the force of desire and having an intention to do something is fundamentally concerned with changing the world as it is, and also has three acts or modes: intention-​in-​actions, prior intentions, and desires. An intention-​in-​action is an act of bodily movement and the most basic form of volition. Raising an arm, scratching an itch, or considering how large a tip

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Social ontology 203 to leave for a mediocre waiter are intentions-​in-​action that actualize at the moment of the bodily movement or thought process. Searle relates that often when considering a philosophical problem he spontaneously rises from his chair to pace around his office, an action whose intention to do so is almost unconscious. As these examples show, the vast majority of bodily and mental actions in daily life are intentions-​in-​action. In contrast, a prior intention adds a temporal dimension to the process of forming intentions to act, prefiguring intentions-​in-​action by premeditation or planning. People continually schedule their lives, making plans and setting dates. Scheduling a haircut in the afternoon, for instance, sets in motion a multitude of likely intentions-​ in-​action to achieve the goal. The formation of the concept of a “future,” and the ability to consider different strategies and pathways one might take to attain the goal, is a unique ability of human consciousness, in contrast to the consciousness of other animals, being relatively “stuck in time” (Roberts 2002). Human “desire” is the most complex form of volitional intention, and extends far beyond preconscious instinctual drives and basic needs for food, water, etc. Desires (and demands) are inclusive of bodily and social wants and needs. Different people want and wish for an almost unlimited range of objects, experiences, and events:  they are hungry for bread and thirsty for beer; they lust for sex, money, and power; they hope for companionship, happiness, and world peace.5 To return to the argument in chapter three concerning Searle’s “unified conscious field” and the potential for both spatial and temporal roaming, Searle’s general structure of intentionality specifies in finer detail how basic structural capacities of consciousness lay the groundwork for higher-​order cognitive and volitive actions. The pre-​predicative or prelinguistic capacities of consciousness provide the basic structure for higher-​order modes of cognition and volition and the capacity of human agency for reflexivity. Once linguistic capacities are brought to bear, the full-​on human nature of consciousness arises at the intersection of its prelinguistic and linguistic capacities. These capacities are not discrete but held together by an internal relation bridging the concrete aboutness of consciousness (as intentional states) and the logical functioning of language (through speech acts). The linkage is simple and elegant, and in virtue of the homology between the two indicates how language is grounded in consciousness at the same time as language stands apart from consciousness as an emergent social form. Thus, the most primitive functioning of conscious intentionality (perception and intentions-​in-​action) enables the most advanced functioning of conscious intentionality (belief and desire as speech acts), and this linkage is possible because “both speech acts and intentional states have propositional contents, conditions of satisfaction, and directions of fit” (2010, 66, italics mine). What does this mean? In Searle’s analysis, the “structure of intentional states…divides into two components: the type of state it is and its content, typically a propositional content” (ibid., 27). The intentionality of consciousness, the fact consciousness is essentially and always an “aboutness” of the world around (including

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204  Social ontology itself in terms of reflexivity), takes hold of various “contents,” given by the five senses, memory, anticipation, and modes of cognition and volition. These contents are transposed into propositions such as “it is raining,” and axiomatically relate this content to a “state” that inflects the content with an attitude, perspective, or emotional valence, what Searle calls its “mood.” In Searle’s example (ibid.), consequently, “I can believe it is raining, fear that it is raining, or desire that it is raining.” People can have a Zen-​like indifference to rain or a Londoner’s stoic resignation. Whatever the content, it is the attitude toward or mood of the content that sets its direction of fit in the various states of belief, desire, and intention. Moreover, Searle stresses that for the most part, it is not the proposition toward which agents have beliefs, desires, fears, and indifference, but the content of the proposition, the “objects and states of affairs in the world independent of any proposition” (ibid.).6 The crucial connection between the prelinguistic structure of consciousness in regard to cognition and volition and the linguistic structure of speech acts (with propositional content) is that the latter maps precisely onto the former, with one significant exception (which I will discuss below). On the one hand, the cognitive modalities of perception, memory, and belief each hold to the basic prelinguistic structure of “mind-​to-​world direction of fit” that underlies both the modality and specific “conscious” propositions, such as in the following examples:  a perception—​“I see a tree”; a memory—​“I remember seeing giant sequoias in California”; a belief—​“I believe sequoias can grow over 300 feet tall.” On the other hand, the volitional modalities of intentions-​ in-​action, prior intentions, and desires have the basic prelinguistic structure of “world-​to-​mind direction of fit” that underlies these modalities and all instances of the conscious articulation or activity of them: an intention-​in-​ action—​“looking up to see the treetop”; a prior intention—​“making a plan to visit the Giant Sequoia National Monument tomorrow”; a desire—​“desiring to post pictures of big trees on Facebook to exemplify an outdoorsy, adventurous persona.”7 Conscious intentionality is thus rooted in the prelinguistic structure of consciousness. Making the analytical distinction between the two ensures a “realist” ontology of conscious intentionality. The importance of “direction of fit” for both cognitive and volitional forms of intentional states does not rely on a subjective element or the content of conscious experience. In the mode of a belief or desire, for instance, the fact of their “conditions of satisfaction” of success or failure “represents” these conditions. The purpose or force of a belief or desire is built into the mode:  a belief is about correct knowledge, and a desire is about fulfilling itself—​their conditions of satisfaction are represented by the logic of their direction of fit. Searle notes that the way beliefs and desires “represent” their conditions of satisfaction is a “functional and not an ontological one” (ibid., 30). As I take it, what he means by this is a subtle but necessary distinction between an ontological status of something as “being” real and a functional status of something in its “doing.” In other words, these two basic functions are mechanisms: a

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Social ontology 205 “truth-​giving” mechanism of a belief, and a “need fulfillment” mechanism of a desire. The conditions of satisfaction of a belief (qua its grounding in perception) or desire (qua its grounding in intention-​in-​action) set forth the complementary thresholds for a successful belief (the belief is actually true) or a successful desire (the desire is actually fulfilled). As to functions, Searle notes (ibid.) his critics (phenomenologists and empiricists, especially) cannot abide that functions are not immediately available to phenomenological introspection or third-​person empiricist accounts of consciousness (as would be the ontological claims each methodology might generate). For the phenomenologist and empiricist, conditions of satisfaction fall outside of their truth-​telling procedure and hence do not exist.8 The point is missed without recourse to the prelinguistic structure of conscious intentionality, especially the most “primitive” or basic forms, those of cognition as perception and volition as intentions-​in-​action, which provide the essential functional logic (of their direction of fit and representation of conditions of satisfaction) of memory and prior intentions and their “highest-​order” modalities, beliefs and desires.9 While the representation of the conditions of satisfaction is a function of a belief (true or false) or a desire (fulfilled or unfulfilled), these “conditions” pertain to the ontological-​existential features of conscious intentionality, grounding consciousness in external reality because perceptions concern a basic knowledge of the world and intentions-​in-​action concern basic actions in the world. Conscious intentionality is inveterately grounded in reality because conditions of satisfaction succeed or fail only in relation to “conditions in the world which must be satisfied if the intentional state is to be satisfied” (ibid., 29, italics mine). Insofar as these conditions “in the world” are objective and intransitive, they are intimately tied to a “reality principle” in terms of true and false beliefs and the ways social forms enable and constrain subject-​agent projects (desires) as fulfilled or unfulfilled. Objective conditions of satisfaction attach to intentional states as intrinsic “representations of what must be the case in the world if the fit is to come about” (ibid.). As such, “a belief represents its truth conditions, a desire represents its fulfillment conditions, an intention represents its carrying out conditions” (ibid.). The essential point is that cognitive “mind-​ to-​ world” and volitive “world-​ to-​ mind” directions of fit represent conditions of satisfaction for beliefs to-​be-​true and desires to-​be-​ fulfilled as objective consequences following from the prelinguistic structure of conscious intentionality.

From conscious intentionality to collective intentionality For a group, nation, collectivity, and so on—​for any term capturing a sense of sociality—​the essential quality of anything “social” of course is its shared, intersubjective dimension connecting at least two people, and this fact is a prerequisite for a theory of social ontology accounting for the formation of social forms. The philosophical term Searle employs to describe

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206  Social ontology the nature of intersubjectivity is the concept of collective intentionality. In Searle’s view (2003, 198), collective intentionality is a “biologically based capacity” enabled by modes of communication (language and symbols), which results in cooperation when brought about by “consciously shared attitudes such as shared desires, beliefs, and intentions.” And yet, if collective intentionality is the hallmark of sociality, the further capacity that sets off human cultures from other social animals that engage in cooperative behaviors (e.g., wolves, bees, and monkeys) is the additional capacity of forming “institutional reality” through sets of constitutive rules granting functions to social institutions, within which human existence is primordially shaped. Searle’s concept of collective intentionality begins with question, “how could our collective intentionality move my body?” (2010, 50, Searle’s). In answer, Searle outlines the structure of collective intentionality in cooperation. First, he draws on the relation between aforementioned modes of volition, “prior intentions” and “intention-​in-​actions,” such as in the case Searle raises his right arm to a vote in a meeting when asked “all those in favor, raise their arm.” A prior intention causes an intention-​in-​action, which in this case equates with bodily movement to raise an arm. Raising an arm in a vote, however, is a means to do something above and beyond waving an arm around in the air. For this second feature, Searle notes that many “human actions” have a “special feature” whereby people “do something by means of or by way of doing something else” (ibid., 51, italics Searle’s). In the first case of doing something “by means of,” people do things by means of doing something else. They turn on the lights by means of flipping the switch; they procure a meal by means of phoning their local pizza delivery. In doing something “by means of,” people initiate a process with a direct causal relationship between what they do and what they seek to achieve. In the second case of doing something by way of, and in contrast, when Searle raises his right hand to vote he “does not cause the vote to take place; it just constitutes voting” (ibid.). He votes by way of raising his arm. Likewise, paying the pizza delivery driver: the economic transaction is not caused by handing over cash; it is constituted by way of the exchange. The difference between the two types of actions, “flipping the switch to turn on the light” and “raising a right arm to vote,” is generated by two “types of inner structure of action:  the causal by-​means-​of relation and the constitutive by-​way-​of relation” (ibid., italics Searle’s). In terms of collective intentionality: If we are cooperating in some group endeavor, where our individual contribution causes some further effect, then we have the causal by-​means-​of relation. And if we are cooperating in an endeavor where our individual efforts constitute the desired effect, then we have the constitutive by-​way-​ of relation. (Ibid.,  51–​52)

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Social ontology 207 Collective intentions-​in-​action as causal or constitutive in their effects are situations of cooperation. The nature and ontology of the end result determines which form of cooperation is required. It is causal when the collective aim is a materially grounded product or effect, such as the thousands of people, engineers, scientists, corporate administrators, and assembly line workers involved in the production of a jet plane or a cellphone, who, by means of working together, cause the plane or phone to be built. The effect is constitutive when the cooperative effort by individual members is simultaneous to the fulfillment of the collective aim. In this form of cooperation, the emergent and extra-​material reality of the social world is created of pizza parties, elections, games, institutions, and so on. In Searle’s basic example, in an orchestra each musician plays a small part of the larger musical score; however, the collection of individual efforts “does not cause the music to be performed…, [it] simply constitutes the performance” (ibid., 52, italics Searle’s).10 A primary assumption behind collective intentionality is that “all intentionality, whether collective or individual, has to exist inside individuals’ heads,” and thus any personal sense of cooperation and participation in collective action is subjectively realized (ibid., 44). This necessitates a clear exposition of how a collective “we-​intentionality” informs individual intentionality that can cover the fact that for many forms of collective intentionality (whether causal by-​means-​of or constitutive by-​way-​of actions) the content of one person’s individual intentionality differs from everybody else’s in the collective, such when performing a piece of orchestral music or playing a team sport, where different roles and parts interlock to form collective action. Furthermore, “in collective intentionality, it cannot be required of each individual’s intentionality that he know what the intentionality on the part of others is” (ibid., 45). The specific thoughts, motivations, precise actions, and degree of commitment of different participants holding to a common aim as bandmates, teammates, etc. are typically unknown. What is “known,” a necessary assumption of each participant in a collective intention, is a “belief ” that others in the collectivity “share one’s collective goal and intend to do their part in achieving the goal” (ibid.). An individual’s assumption of “being on the same page” with others, however differentiated and opaque others’ intentions are, enables highly complex forms of collective intentionality, bridging and integrating separate agents across spatial and temporal divides. Participants in collective actions need only to believe their companions have the same intention, as Searle asserts (ibid., 53), “to achieve a collective B by means of a singular A.” Legal, political, and economic systems, for example, and the activities they govern, are profound collective intentional orders which enable agents to anticipate future behavior of others in relation to the projects and plans agents form. The ability to anticipate with reasonable certainty future behaviors gives rise to social-​system continuity and continued collective cooperation to these effects. Collective prior intentions and material instantiation by collective intentions-​in-​action thus connect the collective aims of groups, networks, and societies to the individuals who compose various

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208  Social ontology collectivities, whether civil society organizations, multinational corporations, polities of every stripe, and even “non-​traditional marriages.” The philosophical import of collective intentionality thus turns on Searle’s claim (ibid., 156) “that there is a social ontology to any group that shares collective intentionality.” Moreover, for Searle (ibid.), a “social fact… is any fact that contains a collective intentionality of two or more human or animal agents.” The essential element of cooperation embedded in collective intentionality has implications for the meaning and value of sociological concepts, such as “society,” whose meaning per se “does not name a form of collective intentionality” (ibid.). A society constituted by territorial or geographical boundaries can be riven by civil war or other deep tensions, giving rise to antagonistic collective intentionalities of multiple viewpoints, unshared and divisive. Searle’s point is the social ontological creation of social facts only occurs when there are common “Background practices” and “presuppositions” setting “norms of behavior,” which then provide a sufficient backbone to a collectivity, and “indeed, without some degree of shared Background, it is hard to see how a society could function” (ibid.). Searle (ibid.) notes in addition that “the nation-​state is perhaps the most famous form of political collective intentionality,” but history is replete with many other forms:  Native American tribes; Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Inca, and Aztec empires; the Han dynasty, USSR, United Nations, European Union, etc. The rise and fall of political collective intentionalities hinges in existential terms on the ability of a polity to sustain its collective intentionality of cooperation and norms in the face of internal and external forces of dissolution. Searle notes further, in contradistinction, there are putative sociopolitical groups that are unlikely to have collective intentionality. Searle (ibid.) argues what is referenced by the term the “black community,” and I would add the “white community,” do not exist because it is unclear what would be the “collective intentionality which pervades all or even most of the people” so ascribed to the community. In the US, this issue is foregrounded in complications surrounding the meaning and identity of the “Latino community” because of the diverse origins and cultures that are included within the “Latino population” of Cuban, Caribbean, South and Central American, Spanish and indigenous Mexican peoples, and so on. What is the basis for a “shared Latino background” besides exclusion from the category of “white America”? As is frequently the case, categories of race, ethnicity, nationality, as well as gender and sexual orientation, assumed as a “natural” or “given” basis for an imputed collective intentionality, are a product of the power not of the category members themselves, but an ascription of identity by dominant majorities, sometimes for good, often times for ill.

A stumble in Searle’s social ontology? Before moving deeper into Searle’s social ontology, I want to address a potential challenge to Searle’s notion of “collective intentionality” made by Donati

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Social ontology 209 and Archer (2015). The central issue concerns the nature of the connections that establish a sense of “we-​ness,” binding people together in collective activities, such as in the examples of playing a football game, attending a cocktail party, or dancing in a ballet. My defense of Searle will largely reiterate points made above; however, it is worthwhile to clarify the argument. In the final analysis I think there is no contradiction, and in the interest of metatheory-​ building, Donati and Archer’s and Searle’s work can be integrated and produce an emergent “good.” Donati and Archer argue Searle’s theory of collective intentionality rests on a problematic form of “we-​ness,” which they term the “plural subject.”11 The “we-​ness” of the Plural Subject is grounded in “we think,” which purportedly binds people together, when at least “two heads contai[n]‌the plural form of intentionality—​‘We intend’ ” to do something (ibid., 40). Donati and Archer object to a sense of “we-​ness” if it consists of shared and identical “we intention” by all parties within the collective action. As we saw in chapter six, to Donati and Archer, “we-​ness” does not rely on a shared intention, but rather a shared orientation toward relational goods and evils that emerge through human relationships. The nature of “we-​ness,” on which Searle’s concept of collective intentionality relies, is important because it is essential to the causal mechanism responsible for social reality, namely a status function Declaration. In support of their theory of the relational subject and focus on relational goods, Donati and Archer are keen to show the inadequacy of Searle’s notion of collective intentionality (“we think”) as the ontological basis for “the sense of collectivity or the feeling of togetherness, for which a sociological case can be made” (ibid., 40, italics Donati and Archer’s). To Donati and Archer, “we think” or “shared intentionality” is a problem because there is no a priori justification that any or all members of a collective really in fact share the same intention to act. Donati and Archer argue, “we do not see any sociological grounds upon which personal intentions should be derivative from collective intentionality” (ibid., 41). Donati and Archer give several examples of informal and formal instances of collective action:  “sweeping the yard together, playing in a football game or in an orchestra, or taking part in a ballet” (ibid.). For each of these collective activities, in Donati and Archer’s view, Searle’s theory suggests they are made possible by a shared “we think” in virtue of each member’s holding the thought: “I only intend as part of our intending” (ibid.). They argue, however, even in formal collective “doings,” personal intentions “to do” cannot be derived from a collective intention, because: Whilst it can be true that “We want to win the game, play the symphony,” and so on, it is not necessarily the case that this constitutes collective intentionality. Quite different individual intentions are compatible with these joint actions. For example, particular people may play in the hope of being talent spotted, or, in a different kind of play, one actor, dancer,

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210  Social ontology or instrumentalist “upstages” others for personal reasons. Thus, genuine collective intentionality would imply a commitment to joint action, but the former cannot be deduced from the later. (Ibid.,  41–​42) Donati and Archer are correct to assert individuals in collective forms of action can (if not always) have diverse motivations underlying their intention to act collectively. However, Donati and Archer’s critique appears to misunderstand Searle’s position. To Searle, collective intentionality in its general meaning is a collection of people who have the same “conscious aboutness” of something: a belief, desire, or intention. It appears Donati and Archer get caught in the confusion over “intentionality” in its phenomenological register and “intention” as an act of intending to do something. Donati and Archer, in effect, have reduced intentionality to the act of intending. This confusion has the consequence of blocking from view two essential features of a collective intentionality. First, collective action in Searle’s theory is organized around a shared goal and not around shared content because of inherent limitations to individual conscious intentionality of others’ intentions-​in-​action. For Searle, in a collective action: The content of my singular intentionality…does not make essential reference to the content of your singular intentionality. I simply take it for granted, in that context, that if I do my part we will be trying to achieve the goal, because I am operating on the assumption that you will do your part, and you are operating on the assumption that I will do my part. There is an epistemic basis for this: often one does not know what the individual intentionality in the minds of the other members of the collective is. I  might have collective intentionality to achieve a certain goal, and I have that on the assumption that you are working toward the same goal as I am. But it need not be the case that I actually know the content of your intentionality. (2010, 54) Collective intentionality giving rise to collective action must have a commonality, a “we-​ ness” that leads to collective action, and the threshold assumption or presupposition is a goal. This is a consequence of the fact, Searle contends, that: [A personal] intention-​in-​action can only make reference to things I can cause (or at least believe I  can cause). In order to engage in collective behavior I  have to believe (or assume or presuppose) that others are cooperating with me. And their cooperation will consist in their having intentions-​in-​action that specify the same goal as I have but need not specify the same means to the goal. (Ibid., 53)

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Social ontology 211 Searle is pointing out, to give his example, that football players often do not know what other players are doing during a game, viz., they do not know others’ intentions-​in-​action. The same holds true of others’ motivations to play: players can only assume or presuppose they have a similar goal. Second, collective intentionality also contains what Searle terms the Background. Collective intentionality includes shared beliefs, desires, fears, intentions, etc., but it also includes types of shared, intersubjective, and contextual features. Searle defines the “Background” as “all those abilities, capacities, dispositions, ways of doing things, and general know-​how that enable us to carry out own intentions and apply our intentional states generally” (2010, 31). The problem with Donati and Archer’s critique of Searle is their focus on the intention of the individual, which forgets that collective intentionality also includes a recognition of and adherence to the desire-​independent conditions of action, above the multitude of desire-​dependent reasons for action each member may have as their “intentions” within a “we-​ness” or “we-​doing.” In the orchestra example, the “Background” or “context” or “desire-​independent conditions of action” compose the form to which all band members must conform in some minimal sense. The player’s individual motivations (or intentions) are irrelevant to the production of music if the goal (or relational good) is achieved. Donati and Archer critique Searle’s concept of the Background as insufficiently developed and “ ‘wheeled in and out’ like stage scenery” in Searle’s account of collective action (ibid., 42). I agree with Donati and Archer that Searle does not give adequate weight to the effects of both the context of collective action and the social forms that are in play, providing conditions of enablement and constraint for all social action. However, despite Searle’s ontological actualism or, in Donati and Archer’s words, the sin of “presentism,” the background at least gives reference to social context and forms. And if we substitute the more robust DCR conception of social forms (positional forms of agency and identity, structures, cultural systems, and a built environment) as real, emergent, and predicated on their causal powers, Searle’s corpus is enhanced without undermining his larger social ontological claims. Donati and Archer are correct that “shared orientations” bring people together in collectivities and constitute the self as a relational subject. Donati and Archer are also correct that “Relational Subjects can achieve a ‘we-​ness’ without our needing to invoke ‘we-​thinking’ as a necessary mechanism or mediatory process,” if “we-​thinking” is defined as an identical motivation for an intention-​in-​action (ibid., 50, italics Donati and Archer’s). Donati and Archer’s critique that Searle’s sense of “we-​ness” entails “we-​thinking” rests on the mistake of supposing “we-​thinking” is singularly predicated on a shared intention to do something from a shared motivation that exists in the heads of all members of the “we.” Donati and Archer correctly reject this requirement and locate a “shared orientation” to emergent relational goods

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212  Social ontology and evils. However, even for Donati and Archer, there is a sense that a collective on some level is going to be predicated on shared and more or less identical thoughts. The question thus is what type of thought. Donati, Archer, and Searle all agree that it is a common goal or shared orientation. Thus, I  find Donati and Archer’s theory of the relational subject and focus on emergent relational goods and evils wholly compatible with Searle’s understanding of collective intentionality. Moreover, their problem with analytic philosophical approaches to “we-​ness” that rely on “logical derivation rather than causal accounts of large-​scale social phenomena” misses the point, at least in Searle’s case (ibid., 53, italics Donati and Archer’s). Donati and Archer argue that the tendency of analytic philosophers (like Searle) to “extrapolate” from the “micro-​to macro-​levels”—​from the nature of “interpersonal relations,” a basic logic (or a commonality) that holds true, “to the macroscopic level of social institutions”—​is theoretical overreach. Whether or not micro-​and macro-​levels can be fruitfully conjoined under a common logic is determined by the adequacy of the approach taken and if, in fact, the linkage exists. Searle claims that “all institutional reality is created and maintained in existence by (representations that have the same logical form as) SF [status function] Declarations, including the cases that are not speech acts in the explicit form of Declarations” (2010, 13, italics Searle’s). If this claim is true, then Searle’s method is not to extrapolate from micro-​to macro-​levels (or vice versa), but rather to find the common denominator of both levels (which of course would be conceptual/​propositional) because the “institutional reality” under question includes the intersubjective (friendship, cocktail parties, rounds of mini golf) as well as large-​scale social phenomena (patriarchy, money, government, etc.). Searle argues there is a “logical (conceptual, propositional) structure [to society] that admits of, indeed requires logical analysis” of society, and this structure can be mirrored and understood in terms of logic, such as a status function Declaration (X is Y in C) (ibid., 6). This “logical derivation,” however, does not explain actual, concrete instances of a Declaration and the institutional reality it creates through collective intentionalities (Donati and Archer, 2010, 53). Consequently, even if Donati and Archer are correct that analytic philosophers “generally trea[t]‌…logical derivations and causal accounts to be…redundant” (which I  do not think Searle is guilty of), social scientists can ignore such pretensions and do their work (ibid.). Real people with specific powers are the architects of society and reproduce or transform its forms. None of the details is provided a priori, only the “conceptual, propositional” process, a process which, by the lights of DCR depth ontological claims, only manifests in the domain of the actual through the express power of the Declaration to create institutional reality. Nonetheless, Donati and Archer critique Searle and other theorists of the “plural subject approach”—​justly in my mind—​concerning their “presentism,” a consequence of missing three central features to social ontology (2015, 67). Searle’s account neither addresses the emergence of efficient and material causal powers in play, nor incorporates how agents singularly and

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Social ontology 213 collectively engage in reflexive consideration of the activity and context at hand, nor theorizes the process of social reproduction and transformation (morphostasis and morphogenesis) (ibid., 30). I agree with Donati and Archer on this point, and their understanding of the relational subject goes far to extend and develop Searle’s account of collective intentionality. That said, my defense of Searle’s account of “collective intentionality” as a basis for “we-​ness” is motivated to protect Searle’s larger argument that status function Declarations are the causal mechanism responsible for creating institutional reality. Declarations of this type necessarily depend on a collective basis, on a “we-​ness” that remains concept-​and activity-​dependent on individual people, to which I turn now.

Status function Declarations At this stage in the exposition of Searle’s theory of social ontology, we are now in a better position to understand the significance of status function Declarations. As shown above, the logical functioning of direction of fit and conditions of satisfaction for cognitive and volitive modes of conscious intentionality is emergent, prelinguistic capacities of the biological brain. What sets apart human conscious intentionality from other animals is the overlay of language, transmuting these prelinguistic capacities and logics into “precise” expressions of propositional content.12 Perceptions, memories, and beliefs, as well as intentions-​in-​action, prior intentions, and desires, can be voiced, communicated, and reflected upon. And it is precisely the intertwining of the structure of consciousness and language that enables the higher-​order modes of cognitive and volitive forms of memory and prior intentions and beliefs and desires to attain their full functional powers. However, in comparison, the logic of status function Declarations has a pivotal distinction in that “there is no prelinguistic analogue for Declarations. Prelinguistic intentional states cannot create facts in the world by representing those facts as already existing. This remarkable feat requires language” (ibid., 69, italics Searle’s). While Searle does not expressly use the language of DCR emergent causal powers materialism, the power to “create facts in the world by representing those facts as already existing” is compatible with DCR philosophical materialism and its realist view of causality pertaining to social ontology. The emergence basis is thus the capacities associated with cognition and volition which provide the foundation for the emergent capacity of humans to make status function Declarations and ultimately social reality. Such is the case:  the creation of a social reality is a shared, intersubjective process and event, one that binds people together through specific institutional regimes of economy, polity, and ideology, all of which compose a system of intransitive sociocultural forms. As noted, collective intentionalities support “non-​linguistic institutional facts such as money, property, and government, and marriage” (ibid., 93). Through status function Declarations, “all of institutional reality is created by linguistic representation” (ibid., 14). Through speech acts and power of

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214  Social ontology semantics, people create a social reality of “powers…[that] go beyond the powers of semantics” (ibid., 93). The status function Declaration (X is Y in context C) contains both world-​to-​mind and mind-​to-​world directions of fit in its operation. The “logical operation” of a Declaration creates a reality (world-​to-​mind) by representing it as such (mind-​to-​world). The collective assignment of status functions by the logical structure of a Declaration is always an extension of powers that the “object(s), person(s) or other sort of entity(ies)” do not have as intrinsic capacities or properties (ibid., 94). These powers have to be invested into the person/​entity and recognized as such to invoke ethical, behavioral, and/​or obligatory demands on people. A piece of paper is only a dollar bill by virtue of its certification and production by the US Treasury Department. Donald Trump is President of the United States because the election was certified and he won a majority in the electoral college. In all cases, however, deontological powers require language, because there is a necessary semantic concept which always precedes the status function Declaration. In Searle’s example (ibid., 95), to institute an obligation for somebody to do something (pay taxes, pay respect to one’s elders, pay it forward), the semantic concept of “obligation” is a necessary precondition for any specific instantiation of an obligation. The same holds for a “right” or “duty” or “responsibility.” The semantic concept is an ontological threshold, above which a deontological power such as an “obligation” is distinguished from primitive, “prelinguistic dispositions” to do something—​in Searle’s example, the “fear and respect” an “alpha male wolf ” elicits from the wolf pack because of his size and strength (ibid). For humans as well, there appears to be a “gradual transition” from dispositions to behave (the child’s impulse to run out into the street) and obligations to behave (laws against jaywalking). The transition appears to come with maturation and growing levels of self-​control, as it remains unclear, in my experience, if two-year-​olds can have much sense of obligation over and above their sense of entitlement. The key point is that for deontology in general and obligations in particular, deontological powers oblige and license actions and behavior that are independent (though they can coincide) from agents’ desires, inclinations, and dispositions. Given that status function Declarations are the ontological basis (or causal mechanism) for the creation of institutional reality, Searle argues (ibid., 103) that despite being “less obvious,” the “continued existence” of deontic powers in time and across space relies on “representations that work like [status functions].” The reproduction and continuation of status functions “exist only as long as they are so recognized or accepted” (ibid.). Through speech acts and practice, such things as militaries, civil society, nations-​states, and even a “BFF” are constituted by iterant usage of the forms, meanings, structures, and powers via active and continued collective intentions, effectively “re-​Declaring” the status function. Searle gives three historical examples of speech acts whose rise and fall from use were predicated on changing collective attitudes toward certain categories of person in terms of status

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Social ontology 215 functions and associated deontic powers and liabilities. The legal status of “spinsters,” the Eastern Bloc address of “comrade,” and the connotations of a “lady” versus a “gentleman” all have evaporated, as the institutions categorizing and defining people by their status in these terms have lost their recognition and acceptance. So far, I have only discussed the type of Declaration that proclaims “X is Y in context C,” but there is a more basic or rudimentary type of Declaration, those creating “free-​standing Y terms,” where a new status function is created without an actual “X.” Declarations of a “Y,” such as electronic money (e.g., Bitcoin) and corporations (e.g., the thousands of shell companies listed in the “Panama Papers,” used as tax havens), are instances when the status function Declaration creates an institutional reality “without attaching it directly to any person or material object” (ibid., 101). An earlier version of Searle’s theory of institutional reality (1995) was critiqued by Smith (2003) concerning Searle’s omittance of those cases of institutional reality that display the logic of a “freestanding Y term” (Smith’s phrase). Searle had only recognized the logic of “X counts as Y.” Searle accepted Smith’s critique, and subsequently decided the logic of the freestanding Y is more basic than the logic of “X counts as Y in C.” All the same, like “X is Y in C,” the Declaration of freestanding Y terms ultimately creates deontic powers made use of by real people: the power of somebody to possess and spend Bitcoins; the power of a person or persons to own a corporation—​however obscure—​and to engage in economic activity with legal rights and protections. For Searle, the logic of freestanding Y terms gives status function Declarations their final and most basic form: We (or I) make it the case by declaration [sic] that a Y status function exists in C and in so doing we (or I) create a relation R between Y and a certain person or persons, S, such that in virtue of SRY, S has the power to perform acts (of type) A. (2010,  101–​2) Consequently, the preceding formula is the foundational algorithm of social reality and mechanism of social ontology. Human beings create and maintain an institutional reality of deontological powers via status function Declarations, using “X is Y” or “Y”, which give rise to desire-​independent reasons for action.

Institutional reality and institutional facts The emergence of social forms via status function Declarations creates an institutional reality of various functions deemed necessary within specific sociocultural milieus. It is a historical and anthropological question why a society has one kind of institution and not another: why some societies are matriarchal and others patriarchal; why some people worship their ancestors

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216  Social ontology and others worship a pantheon of gods; or why a redistribution of wealth is achieved by progressive taxation or potlatch (or even whether a society has mechanisms for wealth redistribution). The social ontological question takes a further step back to understand the fundamental mechanism responsible for all variations of social institutions. Searle’s answer points to collective intentionality behind all status functions Declarations as the basis for social ontological explanation of social forms. Searle defines an institution as “a system of constitutive rules, and such a system automatically creates the possibility of institutional facts” (ibid., 10). Searle writes, “institutional facts range all the way from the informality of friendship to the extreme legal complexities of international corporations” (ibid., 91). Institutions are in a sense a deontological structure, with attendant rights, duties, obligations, and liabilities, in both informal institutions with an uncodified deontology (friendship and birthday parties) and formal institutions with a codified deontology (corporations and schools). Searle notes that certain deontological rights and responsibilities are not institutions in the formal sense of a university or legal code, such as a moral duty to help people in need. In contrast, codes or structures of behavioral expectations (often backed by force and sanctions, real or imagined) are both deontological and an institutional fact, such as the US Bill of Rights, neighborhood associations, and the Ten Commandments. Searle also notes (ibid., 92) there are “general forms of human activity that are not themselves institutions but which contain institutions: science, religion, recreation, literature, sex, eating”; and likewise for “professional activities” such as “law, medicine, academia, theater, carpentry, and retail trade.” The key characteristic of institutions is their functions, and, in most general terms, they function to enhance human powers to do things in the world. A  “function” as “a cause that serves a purpose,” in its generic mechanistic sense, is a process that results in some end (ibid., 59, italics Searle’s). The ability to use objects in a functional way is not a unique human trait. Many animals make use of sticks and various objects to build shelters and procure food. The function of plant leaves is to gather carbon molecules by photosynthesis; the function of hearts is to circulate blood; the function of sexual reproduction is to promote genetic variability and environmental adaptedness in future generations.13 What is unique is the ability of human beings to grant objects and people functional capacities which have no relationship to their intrinsic character or makeup. Only human beings can recognize institutional facts, such as a particular person as “Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,” a piece of paper as a “$100 bill,” or a football crossing a line as a “touchdown” and worth six points. These facts, while dependent on human collective intentionality, become objective, intransitive features of social reality. Social facts are formed by specific constitutive rules, all of which have a singular underlying logical structure. In Searle’s formal schematics, Declarations state that “X counts as Y” or “X counts as Y in

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Social ontology 217 context C,” such that “the Y term just is the X term represented in a certain way” (ibid., 9). The general function of institutions, created by status function Declarations, is to enhance human power. As Searle argues: The whole point of the creation of institutional reality is not to invest objects or people with some special status valuable in itself but to create and regulate power relationships between people…; it is about people’s activities and about the power relations that not only govern but constitute those activities. (Ibid., 106, italics mine) Power relations in virtue of deontic powers constitute relationships between people: men and women, adults and children, citizens and non-​, bosses and underlings. Status functions determine who is certified, authorized, verified, and has passed the test. They determine who is in charge, who is responsible to whom, who has rights and who does not. They codify conduct, set the rules of the game, demarcate good and bad, and institute social hierarchies. They enable intersubjective relations of family, polity, economy, and religion. They make leaders and make slaves. Ultimately, a status function Declaration is a power to create value, whether in the form of money, home runs, or privilege, and to repeat, always concerned fundamentally with the constitution and regulation of human relationships. For an institution to function (private property, government, purchasing power of money, etc.) for collective recognition and acceptance (however begrudging the acceptance is), the “participants [must] understand the deontology carried by status functions” in order for them to “lock into human rationality…and provide reasons for actions” (ibid., 102). For example, the right of a police officer to command someone to “stop, in the name of the law” requires the person to understand the nature of a “right” in the first place and the institution of “law and order” in the second, concepts which must be intelligible and recognized at the very least. The reasons for actions when complying with instructions given by a police officer (to stop walking, not make any suspicious movements, hand over identification, acquiesce to questions and frisking, etc.) are determined in this case by a recognition of police powers and the underlying threat of force and punishment. In addition, once deontological powers are accepted, as Searle notes (ibid.), there is no “need [for] a separate attitude of recognition or acceptance for institutional facts within a preexisting institutional structure” (italics Searle’s). Once the institution of “state security” is accepted, for example, the power for warranted wiretaps, opening mail, search and seizure, detainment, etc., is part and parcel of the greater deontic power. Any controversies surrounding the deployment of these powers “are epistemic” (ibid., 103). The “right” is not in question, only its execution: did the police have “probable cause”; was there use of “excessive force”; was the suspect properly “Mirandized”; etc.

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The role of language in social ontology While the formal schematic of a Declaration is logical (X is Y in C), in the real world, collective intentionality and Declarations rely on concepts, and ultimately language. As such, language is the foremost social institution, and is presupposed by all other higher-​order institutions. As an ontological foundation, Searle argues that “language is partly constitutive of all institutional reality” (2003, 203). Institutional reality is created by Declarations which simultaneously prefigure their representation as a reality. The institution of language, however, is unlike all other social institutions such as marriage, markets, and political leadership, because language is “self-​identifying” in virtue of the nature of semantics, which provides an ontological grounding. The semantic content of propositions ties the meaning of words to the external world (as their referents) at the same time as language is grounded in an innate, prelinguistic structure of cognition and volition (and their direction of fit and conditions of satisfaction). Thus, the innate capacity for language wedded to the acquisition of a “native tongue” allows consciousness to bloom into fully formed human being. Social institutions constituted by language, on the contrary, are not self-​sufficient for their existence—​they require constant rehearsal and acceptance, in effect a continuing re-​Declaration, either tacitly or explicitly, for their existence. In order for collective intentions to become institutions with various deontic powers associated with social forms of agency and other facts such as money, universal time zones, calendars, and nation-​state borders, such intentionalities require their representation or “appropriate thoughts” for them to be named, recognized, and considered (ibid.).14 Appropriate thoughts for anything are “essentially symbolic or linguistic devices” that are conventional and intelligible (because they are shared) (ibid.). The proposition “God save the Queen” has specific referents, conventionally marked by English-​language words which are employed to express the statement and provide meaningful and intelligible communication between two or more people. If sincere, to ask God to save the Queen represents and reaffirms both the positions and deontological powers of God and the Queen and the institutions they embody. Searle’s argument for the essential linguistic component to the construction of social reality should remind us of the central position of language in Lacan’s theory of subjectivity. I would argue, in light of my realist reworking of Lacanian concepts, this coalescing of Lacanian and Searlean social theory around the role of language provides a bridge between them in terms of social ontology. Language as the basis for institutional reality is also paramount to the process of socialization and its powerful psychic determinants. Lacan is correct to view language as instrumental in the formation of subjectivity. However, his reduction of consciousness to language (as a “language-​first” philosophy) is a mistake typical of ontological structuralism. The possibility of rationality through reflexive deliberation is provided in the prelinguistic structure of consciousness, and this power of

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Social ontology 219 agency rectifies Lacan. The power of language for representation provides the basis for socialization, but in the same way the bite of a dog is worse than its bark, intransitive formations of institutional deontologies have extensive powers far beyond the semantic contents of speech acts. As such, language is Janus-​faced—​speaking to and from—​and this helps understand the constitutive and determinative roles of language for the agent-​structure relationship. Language is the mediation point of collective intentionality, running through the individual, and binding them into a world of shared meanings and an institutional field of deontic powers. Language is also necessary for human agency, for reflexivity, and the capacity to form concerns, develop projects, and execute practices. As noted above, in Searle’s social ontological schema, the ultimate foundation for human society rests on his argument that language is essential to the constitution of institutional reality. Language is the interface between the prelinguistic structure of intentionality and the emergent social world. Language also has characteristics of all other human institutions, as it is ontologically subjective and intentionality-​dependent. By Searle’s definition, language is itself an institution in virtue of its being a shared and accepted medium of symbolic exchange. It would appear, prima facie, Searle’s argument inaugurates an infinite regress, because a linguo-​semantic “institution” is the central condition of possibility for all social institutions, and yet Searle’s task is to explain the emergence of institutions in the first place. Is there a further or more primordial institution, created by a Declaration, conditioning language? No. Searle argues language is ontologically grounded because of the nature of semantics and requires no lower-​level institutions. The institutional function of language is to enable people to think or utter sentences in keeping with the condition of intelligibility for language to be meaningful, shared, and understood. The conveyance and representation of meaning are the “semantic powers of language” (2010, 112). Consequently, when someone utters with their mouth “grass is green”, the sound pattern counts as a statement “grass is green” when intelligible according to the meaning of the words and rules of syntax of the English language. Words are causally self-​referential to their meaning in relation to a referent and combined into sentences. An utterance “counts as” a sentence because it constitutes a sentence. The point to draw from this mundane example is that “all you need to understand in order to understand the way that the utterance constitutes a statement is to understand the meaning of the sentence” (ibid.). Playing by the rules of chess constitutes a game of chess, and in the same way playing (speaking) by the rules of language constitutes speech acts. For an utterance to count as a speech act, in this case stating a belief (or knowledge claim), in terms of its downward, word-​to-​world direction of fit, “counting as” a statement has ensured the meaning was successfully generated by the power of language to do so, undergirding the “semantic truth” on the one hand, and “real-​world truth” on the other, that indeed “grass is green.” The institution of language given by Declaration (X is Y in C) in a sense is

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220  Social ontology “self-​sufficient” to fulfill its function of conveying meaning, and thus requires no prior Declaration in regress. To take a step back (and to fulfill a promise made above), the crucial premise within Searlean social ontology is the relationship between prelinguistic modes of conscious intentionality and language. In Searle’s model, as noted previously, the linkage between them is three integrated “features” that both share:  “propositional contents, conditions of satisfaction, and directions of fit” (ibid., 66). I have discussed all three of these points above, but I want to focus more specifically on the point that human prelinguistic consciousness also contains propositional contents because conditions of satisfaction and directions of fit are entailed by these propositions as the functional force or purpose of propositions.15 To say that a speech act has propositional content is a truism; to argue prelinguistic consciousness is always (and has been) loaded with propositional contents is a profundity. Searle’s concept of the “unified conscious field,” discussed in chapter three, shows the “aboutness” of consciousness organizes experiences according to their veracity of being, which is inherently propositional in the minimal sense of the world being presented to consciousness as a set of objects, qualities, and relations. The unified conscious field presents the external world (including bodily sensations) as a set of “objects and features,” such that objects stand in relation to one another, each with particular features, qualities, and tendencies; and predominant is the essential distinction between self and other (ibid., 70). As a gestalt field, each object thus stands on its own, but always in relation to “the whole state of affairs”—​all in all, as information (ibid.). Likewise, Searle argues prelinguistic consciousness also includes key “philosophical…categories,” including object, identity, and individuation; space and time; and agency (ibid., 67).16 That prelinguistic consciousness contains propositional contents is the necessary (but not sufficient) condition for language. Prelinguistic consciousness logically precedes language (as evolution proves), and thoroughly undermines the radical idealist mistake to view language as logically prior to intentionality (e.g., Lacan, Heidegger, and other theorists under the pernicious spell of Saussure). Searle’s point is that essential precursors to language are already present to conscious experience. Language is ex post facto to consciousness, and while it remains highly speculative how language develops in evolutionary terms—​the eureka moment of its emergence—​what language provides that “prelinguistic consciousness lacks” is the “fact that language itself structures experiences into discrete segments” and gives the ability to “manipulate semantically loaded syntactical elements at will” (ibid., 68). The propositional contents of prelinguistic consciousness are in effect abstracted and encoded by language, which enables their easy manipulation into various types of speech acts. According to Searle (ibid., 69)  “there are five, and only five, types of illocutionary acts”:

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Social ontology 221 (1) “Assertives” are statements (or speech acts) relaying a belief, “whose point is to represent how things are” and has the word-​to-​world direction of fit, e.g., “the cat is on the mat.” (2) “Directives” are statements of desires, “whose point is to try to get other people to do things,” and have the world-​to-​word direction of fit, e.g., “friend, get your cat off my mat!” (3) “Commissives” are statements of an intention to do something, “whose point is to commit the speaker to some course of action,” and have the world-​to-​word direction of fit, e.g., “I will punish the cat if he is on the mat.” (4) “Expressives” are statements of sentiment, such as “apologies, thanks, congratulations, etc., whose point is to express the speaker’s feelings and attitudes about a state of affairs that is in most cases presupposed to exist already” (ibid.). The direction of fit for expressives is taken for granted, what Searle calls a “null” or “presup” direction of fit, e.g., “I am happy the cat is on the mat.” (5) “Declarations” are statements that create a social reality by representing the reality as existing, e.g., “cats are not allowed on the mat”, and have the double direction of fit: a simultaneous world-​to-​word and word-​to-​ world act of social creation. The collective acceptance of a Declaration creates a deontic power, giving in this case a particular mat a status of being “a place cats are not allowed.” Searle’s purpose behind this careful elaboration of the five illocutionary acts is to show that “the first four types of speech acts have exact analogues in intentional states” (ibid.). These four are extensions of prelinguistic conscious intentionality in virtue of the direction of fit and conditions of satisfaction. Declarations are the exception and do not have a prelinguistic analog; Declarations are only possible with the symbolizing capacity or power of language to represent the world by word and the power language lends to collective intentionality to create a social world by word. The ability to manipulate language is the essential “value add” of language as it pertains to social ontology because it is the creative power that enables “the double direction of fit characteristic of speech acts of a [status function] Declaration” (ibid.). The capacity to take discrete objects and attach new meanings and power only emerges with the development of language to relate, reposition, and redefine the world around us: “this is your bed”; “smoking is not allowed”; “she’s the boss.” While grounded in prelinguistic intentionality, it is at the level of language that agents create institutional reality through the representation of reality. Nonetheless, there is a deontological operation inherent to illocutionary or speech acts that forms the basis for higher-​level deontologies and institutional realities. Searle’s argument is technical but essential in order to understand the linkages between prelinguistic consciousness, language, and emergent social forms. First, Searle makes a distinction between speaker meaning and

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222  Social ontology conventional meaning. Speaker meaning designates merely what somebody wants to say or “the speaker’s meaning that the speaker has on the particular occasion of a particular utterance” (ibid., 73). Conventional meaning is a system of linguistic conventions: words and grammar of a language, la langue in Saussurean terms, that act as a “socially recognized conventional device” to facilitate communication (ibid., 76). Searle argues “speaker meaning is logically prior to…conventional meaning” because the point of communication to is transmit meaning from a speaker to a hearer.17 If the speaker has the intention to make an utterance and intends the utterance to be meaningful, “he must intend that the hearer recognize his meaning intention and indeed recognize that he is intended to recognize it” (ibid., 75). Speakers make use of conventional meanings to say specific things in the “performance of the speech act,” whose “minimal unit” is a sentence (ibid., 77, 79). The priority of speaker meaning over conventional meaning entails the crucial social ontological point: a speech act binds the speaker to the meaning of a sentence. The bond inherent to a speech act performs a function of connecting a speaker and hearer by its meaning, setting forth the most basic collective intentionality toward this shared meaning. What is more, the original bond is elaborated on, and opens the way for human beings to create other institutional realities, which are the “glue that holds human society together” (ibid., 89). Searle’s argument hinges on the way in which the prelinguistic structure of consciousness gives rise to “directions of fit” for beliefs and desires and their “conditions of satisfaction.” Speaker meaning in relation to a hearer contains two overlapping conditions of satisfaction. The first condition pertains to the basic utterance as an intention-​in-​action, and the second pertains to the success of the speech act to communicate meaning, such that there is “the imposition of conditions of satisfaction on conditions of satisfaction” (ibid., 77). If a speaker intends to say to a hearer “it is still raining,” the first condition of satisfaction rests on the success of the utterance to be said actually, with correct diction and grammar choices. For instance, if the speaker accidentally said “is it still raining,” the condition of satisfaction would be unfulfilled because the word order has changed meaning from a declarative sentence to an interrogative. The second condition of satisfaction rests on the successful conveyance of meaning, in this case, the truth value of the speaker’s belief that it is actually raining. The same holds true for all other types of speech acts, such as a promise or request. If a promise is made verbally and understood, then condition number one is fulfilled; and if a promise is kept, then condition number two is fulfilled. These two conditions thus form a bar which determines the success of a speech act to communicate a belief, command, etc. to another hearer, at the same time as a belief commits a speaker to its truth, and a promise commits a speaker to carry out their vow. This double condition of satisfaction highlights that “an essential feature of language…[is] that it necessarily involves social commitments, and that the necessity of these social commitments derives from the social character of the communication situation” (ibid., 80, italics mine).

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Social ontology 223 The double condition of satisfaction built into communication provides the original or primordial deontology that binds human beings to one another, “enabl[ing] language to form the foundation of human society in general” (ibid.). The emergence of a social commitment built into speech acts has two features that form the deontological force or power given by the overlapping conditions of satisfaction. Searle notes that the first is “the notion of an undertaking that is hard to reverse and, the second, the notion of an obligation” (ibid, 82). The “irreversibility” of a commitment arises most strongly when it is made public. Searle may have a belief that it is raining, but once he states the fact, he “can now be held publicly responsible if it turns out to be false” and “committed to being able to provide reasons for the original statement” (ibid.). Likewise, a promise made in public is the “paradigm” of an obligation that has the force of irreversibility (ibid., 83): [My argument that] deontology in the form of commitment is internal to the performance of the speech act runs counter the widely held view in philosophy that the deontic requirements are somehow external to the type of speech act, the view that first we have statement making and then we have a rule that enjoins us to making only true ones; first we have promise making and then we have a rule that obligates us to keep the promises. (Ibid.) On the contrary, “commitment is internal to the type of speech act being performed” (ibid., italics Searle’s). The direction of fit and the conditions of satisfaction that underlie cognition and volition are essential and definitive components of beliefs and desires. Only through speech acts can conditions of satisfaction be imposed on conditions of satisfaction, initiating a deontological commitment of the speaker to the hearer. The prelinguistic structure of intentionality, in comparison, cannot create deontological powers on its own. There is no deontological injunction against having faulty perceptions, memories, or mistaken beliefs on the one hand, or clumsy intentions-​in-​ action, inappropriate prior intentions, or ill-​formed desires on the other hand, for the individual qua non-​social singularity (even if ignorance and clumsiness lead to an early death). Only when the intersubjective possibilities of language emerge, and “map” onto prelinguistic intentionality, does the possibility for “the public assumption of conventionally encoded commitments” arise (ibid., 84).

From language to institutional reality In Searle’s view, out of the deontological commitments internal to speech acts, it follows that all kinds of deontological powers will be elaborated within all kinds of institutional realities that shape and organize human sociality. Once the basic linguistic deontology emerges, it is “easy” and “empirically

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224  Social ontology inevitable” social reality will develop (ibid.). The logic of imposing conditions of satisfaction on conditions of satisfaction that constitute all “intentional acts of meaning” is the prototype for the further creation of social reality by Declaration. A status function Declaration employs the double direction of fit (combining the functions of a belief that it is so and desire that it should be so) to represent a change in the world (X is Y in C). In addition, a status function Declaration imposes of a condition of satisfaction (whether or not the intention-​in-​action is successful) on a condition of satisfaction (whether or not the Declaration is collectively accepted). In conjunction, the double directions of fit and overlapping conditions of satisfaction grant deontological powers to things, people, and contexts. In terms of causality, there is nothing outside collective intentionality creating, recognizing, and maintaining an institution except by the logic of a Declaration “both for their initial creation and continued existence” (ibid., 59). In Searle’s words, while “language itself does not have powers that go beyond meaning…, meanings are used to create powers that go beyond meaning” (ibid., 113). Through shared symbolic forms, emergent social forms are created, with powers and effects which enable and constrain human agency in its three forms. The deontological commitment embedded in speech acts thus prefigures the next level of the emergent institutional reality and its greater “conceptual complexity” (ibid., 94). For Searle, the capacity to say, “he is our leader” or “this is my house” gives the speaker: [An ability] to do something more than represent preexisting states of affairs. You have the capacity to create states of affairs with a new deontology; you have the capacity to create right, duties, and obligations by performing and getting people to accept certain sorts of speech acts. (Ibid.,  84–​85) If collectively accepted, a “public deontology” emerges and attaches desire-​ independent reasons for actions pertaining to the object or person in virtue of the status function Declaration (ibid., 85). Searle notes the first extension of deontological powers to form “institutional realities” beyond language is the “biologically primitive” institutions of “family, marriage, property, and status hierarchies” (ibid., 86). There is no intrinsic limit, however, to the creation of institutional realities by collective intentionality, whose complexity and level of abstraction includes such things as money, government, commandments of God, and cocktail parties. Searle distinguishes “linguistic facts” and “extralinguistic facts” to mark the difference between facts related to the semantic representation of institutions through language and symbols (“appropriate thoughts”) and the emergent facts generated within institutional reality—​from the “facts” of syntactical structures and units of meaning to extralinguistic “facts” of authority, honor, money, and so on. The difference between linguistic and extralinguistic facts is evident from how they perform in the social world.

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Social ontology 225 For Searle, a “linguistic performance” is ordinary speech acts like making a statement, promise, or request: “I am hungry” or “please take out the trash.” In cases of a “nonlinguistic performance,” by comparison, while the performance relies on language (for intra-​and intersubjectivity), it also invokes or calls into being “a convention or rule…in addition to the meaning of the sentence” (ibid., 111, italics Searle’s). It is through “performative creations of institutional facts” that a shared institutional reality is created, maintained, and inhabited:  “I now pronounce you man and wife,” and “this meeting is adjourned” (Searle’s examples), or others such as “yay, I  won the lottery,” and “she won a gold medal in the 100-​meter fly” (ibid.). Marriages, meetings, lotteries, and Olympic swim races are created by status function Declarations. However, in order for any of these utterances-​cum-​statements to be intelligible, the institution represented and drawn upon for significance—​being a “family,” or holding a “meeting”—​must preexist all verbal instantiations in reference to the institution (which is another argument for the intransitivity of an emergent social reality). To clarify the significance of the ontological difference between linguistic and extralinguistic facts, Searle gives a useful example. Despite the similarity in form of the following speech acts, “snow is white” and “Obama is president,” the former fulfills its truth value solely in virtue of the semantic content of the English words denoting that “snow” in normal situations is the color “white” (ibid.). As noted, “the fact that the utterance counts as a particular statement is constitutive of the meaning of the sentence” (ibid., italics Searle’s). On the contrary, the sentence “Obama is president” requires an aspect of justification for its truth value that lies beyond language proper. Obama is not president in virtue of the semantic content of the statement alone. Thinking or saying, “ ‘Obama is president’ by itself is not constitutive of making Obama president or of his being president” (ibid.). In order for Obama to become a US president there must exist a nonlinguistic mechanism that invests him with the power and responsibilities of the office. In this case, the extralinguistic institutional process of becoming a US president includes having won elections, been sworn in, been handed the keys to the White House, etc. In Searle’s words, this mechanism is an “operation of counting,” an operation by which someone (Obama) is counted as something else (US president) (ibid., italics Searle’s). Institutional “facts” are emergent because “the facts in question go beyond facts about meanings. The powers of the presidency are created by semantics, but the powers in question go beyond the powers of semantics” (ibid., 93). While language is necessary for representing nonlinguistic institutional facts, the statement “Obama is president” becomes justified as a true statement only if he is “represented as such, and th[is] representation…[is] collectively recognized or accepted” by virtue of the operation (ibid., 110). For instance, when a judge finds a defendant guilty and orders punishment, a formal process (involving police reports, lawyers, courts, legal codes, etc.) has transformed the defendant into a criminal, facing fines, incarceration, or

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226  Social ontology even death. However, before a defendant can face a court decision, a host of deontological values must be in place and brought to bear. Notions of justice, innocence and guilt, personal responsibility, and a book of regulative rules declaring illegal behaviors necessarily preexist the possibility of a crime and its punishment. In addition, it is precisely through the legitimate (as widely shared and accepted) application of this process in nominal service to innocence, guilt, and justice that the process of “prosecuting and punishing illegal behaviors” is a recognized extralinguistic institutional fact or set of facts. The police have kept the peace, the lawyers have prosecuted and defended, the judge has judged. The powers of all these agents have been granted by operations of counting, requiring specialized schooling, tests and certification, oaths of office, and other established procedures that grant the people who are judges, lawyers, and police the powers of their occupational agency. These agents exercise their deontological powers, relevant to the guilt or innocence of the defendant, whose new status as “guilty” or “innocent of all charges” becomes an emergent or newfound extralinguistic fact in the world. Just as a soccer goal counts as one point for the record books, a defendant found guilty now counts as a criminal. Searle’s identification of the underlying structure responsible for the creation of an extralinguistic facts is both penetrating and extensive. For status function Declarations are the ontological foundation of human sociality. Rooted in capacities of prelinguistic consciousness, agents create, recognize, and accept the institutional reality in which they exist. The collective intentionalities of Declarations undergird a constellation of deontological powers of things, people, and contexts. In other words, by Declaration, agents create social structures, whose deontological positions and powers generate nonlinguistic institutional facts. This singular logic manifests all historical and cultural variations of deontologies, be they spoken, written down on papyrus, clay tablets, and paper, or the mere zeros and ones of digitalia.

Levels of description: ground-​level facts and systemic facts Of the many implications of Searlean social ontology, one most germane to the agent-​ structure problem is Searle’s discussion of the explanatory power of social science to shed light on the relationship between collective intentionalities and institutional reality. Like DCR, Searle’s social ontology implies a “no people, no social reality” principle to locate the causal dependency (by both synchronic and diachronic emergence) of social forms on agency. As noted repeatedly, emergent social forms acquire their own sui generis material causal powers (of enablement and constraint) by their relative endurance in time and space. Searle has his own, I believe, independent version of this general thesis that has its own merits because it focuses on the role of social-​scientific research to understand the lifeworld of human being. At the same time, it helps to understand the relationship between collective intentionality, Declarations, and institutional reality.

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Social ontology 227 The exercise of deontological powers, attached to and the prerogative of social-​structural positions (the powers of political leaders, bankers, soldiers, mothers, etc.), and the relative transparency of these powers to investigation, analysis, and interpretation, nonetheless, frequently (if always) manifests wider and relatively opaque consequences (usually unintended). Activity at the level of individuals creates effects that suffuse social, political, and economic systems, in scope from the hyper-​local, to the national, to the international. Consequently, an epistemic division maps onto an ontological division. What is known and unknown maps onto collective intentionality and emergent effects of people’s behavior within their institutional reality. Collective intentionality of Declarations, which are ontologically grounded via their “recognition or acceptance by the community,” is epistemically segregated from those ontologically emergent unintended consequences which are unrecognized, “unrepresented,” and potentially unacceptable (like an economic recession or geopolitical “blowback”). This division is generated, in Searle’s view, out of the possibility for different “levels of description” of social phenomena (ibid., 16). Searle’s view echoes the realist principle that people’s motivations and projects in many domains of life reproduce—​as an unintended consequence—​the institution that defines and supports their projects. For example, people are motivated to marry for individual reasons and convenience (love, fortune, parental expectations, etc.); they are not normally motivated to marry to reproduce the institution of marriage, but that is an overall effect. In Searle’s framework, the lower-​level description involves what people are thinking and doing at the individual level of “their marriage.” A  higher-​level description would cover the larger social-​structural relations and systems of meanings that individuals participate within and bring into being (willingly or grudgingly) by forming “a marriage” through their reproduction in practice.18 Searle asks, “if institutional facts exist only because they are believed to exist [as collectively accepted], then how can we discover surprising new facts about them? How can the social sciences tell us anything new?” (ibid., 116). The answer lies within Searle’s framework of collective intentionality. Institutional facts at lower levels transcend the individual (viz., the individual participating as a social being), and thus can be described at higher levels. These higher levels in some rudimentary sense are ascertained or discovered only after the fact, and can be given by a “third-​person, anthropological, point of view” (ibid., 117). The ontological point is that while “ground-​floor institutional facts” must be represented and accepted collectively, “systemic fallouts, or consequences, of ground-​floor institutional facts” do not necessary need to be collectively recognized to exist or understood in effect (ibid.). Such “fallouts” can be “institutional facts of which members of the community are unaware…and exist independently of anybody’s representing them as existing, and can indeed be discovered independently of anybody’s opinion” (ibid.).19 Searle gives the example of an economy in a downturn. Economic agents at the “ground-​floor” level of institutional facts, the “fact that people

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228  Social ontology are engaged in buying, selling, and owning goods, and providing services for money,” need not have any idea or premonition that the economy in which they participate is slipping into recession (ibid.). Nonetheless, the “totality of such facts will have higher levels of description where they can be described as a part of a business cycle” (ibid.). These higher-​level facts are “ ‘macro’ institutional facts that are constituted by ‘micro’ institutional facts” (ibid., quoting Andersson 2007). Furthermore, in principle, systemic fallouts “carry no additional deontology, so no new power relations [at least by collective intentionality] are created by fallouts” (ibid., 117). However, once identified and represented, fallouts can be recast by a status function Declaration to create a deontic power attached to the fallout.20 In Searle’s example, the US Congress could “require the Federal Reserve to adjust interest rates during a recession,” thus instituting the fact that a “recession” is a “status term marking a status function because recessions would then have deontic powers” (ibid).

Conclusion Searlean social ontology concerns the “creation and maintenance of the distinctive features of human society” (ibid., 3). Underlying the diversity, complexity, and multiplicity of social phenomena is “one formal linguistic mechanism” used to create institutional facts (ibid., 7). The logical structure of society involves three “primitive notions:  first, collective intentionality; second, the assignment of function; and third, a language rich enough to enable the creation of status function Declarations, including constitutive rules” (ibid., 101). Collective intentionality is the shared beliefs, desires, and desire-​independent reasons of action of a set of people that coordinate their behavior and expectations. The ontological import of a Declaration is that “status functions carry deontic powers that provide the glue that holds human civilization together” (ibid., 9). The adhesive properties of deontic powers, binding collectivities together, “provide us with reasons for acting that are independent of our inclinations and desires” (ibid.). In Searle’s example (ibid., 9), private property as a foundational institution of liberal societies provides “desire-​ independent reasons for action” such as respect for others’ property and formal means of participation in the free market of exchange of goods and services. To covet another’s property (as a desire) does not permit its taking. Theft, fraud, and arson are property crimes which presuppose an inalienable right over legally acquired private property. Desire-​dependent reasons for action, for example, wanting and stealing another person’s Mercedes-​Benz S-​class, are normally overridden by desire-​independent reasons. This core logic of the deontic power of desire-​ independent reasons for action integrates a society through its force to compel people to act in accordance with their cultural milieu, politico-​legal status, and the various institutional regimes (family, economy, politics, etc.) within which they participate. At the same time, nonetheless, social properties of “coherence” and “integration” are relative to every society, as deontic powers

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Social ontology 229 can be contested, and systems of oppression, inequality, and marginalization create contradictions and social tensions. The consequence of institutional structures of desire-​independent reasons (or causes) of action is the “creat[ion] and distribut[ion] of human power” (ibid., 43). The deontic powers embedded in systems of law, mores, contracts, codes of etiquette and behavior, social ranks, hierarchies of authority, and so on provide set pathways of conduct and behavior, which enable and constrain individual actions. Through preexisting institutional forms, people become empowered through various mechanisms that set forth thresholds by which a subject attains such powers: powers “to do” and to be recognized “as” by birthright, certification, authorization, and merit. Simultaneously, by their distribution and inherent power, deontic powers are fundamentally about creating hierarchies (e.g., parent-​child relations, chains of command, caste and aristocratical orders of being), exclusive social spaces (e.g., families, cocktail parties, nation-​states), the vast range of obligations and connections that define and constitute human intersubjectivity (e.g., friendship, baseball games, citizenship), and, all in all, the complex intertwining of these three deontological systems in human institutional life. There are implications of Searle’s social ontology which extend beyond the scope of this chapter; however, I want to conclude with three points that are relevant to many of the themes and objectives of this book. ( 1)  Searle makes a point that harks back to Lacan’s notion of the big Other and the ways in which desire operates within a given social milieu. Searle argues that “the creation of the general field of desire-​based reasons for action presuppos[es] the acceptance of a system of desire-​ independent reasons for action” (2008, 42). The fluidity and indeterminacy of desire requires established, culturally appropriate pathways, such that desire is given meaning and procedures to its fulfillment. Even basic bodily desires of hunger, sex drive, and the elimination of bodily waste are highly structured by cultural taboo and meaning, which become deeply enmeshed in their practice, and consequently affect the shape experience of the bodily desire. “Higher-​level” desires such as “connecting with other people” or “finding satisfaction in one’s work” are even more dependent on an existing system of desire-​independent reasons for action, because the possibility of making connections and finding satisfaction is dependent on deontological forms:  “friendship,” “significant others,” “making a difference,” “well compensated,” and so on. Searle’s point meshes well with the DCR view that emergent social forms are necessary for human agency to actualize and concretize. The ontology of emergent powers materialism within the social world as “social forms” is homogeneous with Searle’s point that desire-​independent reasons for action manifest from collective intentionalities and systems of deontological powers that its members recognize and accept as having power and meaning (and to repeat, acceptance does not necessarily entail approval). The force and power of deontological systems constitute and define institutional facts like the value of diamond

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230  Social ontology rings and 100-​dollar bills and fines for littering. Deontological powers also grant police officers, the president, doctors, lawyers, etc., a range of rights, duties, obligations, and liabilities (what Searle also terms “positive” and “negative” powers) by processes of authorization and/​or certification. The entire field of social positions21 and institutions is characterized by positive and negative powers, and, in its relative durability and temporal precedence to individual subject-​agents, it is onto this structure that subjects lock their desires. Desire-​dependent reasons for action, such as wanting money, fame, power, sex, and “to change the world,” can only be actualized through an existing social-​structural field. These kinds of fundamental desires have to “lock onto” existing social positions, such that to become wealthy, influential, “socially esteemed,” and so forth, to be a tenured professor, medical doctor, West Point graduate, hedge fund multimillionaire, pop music superstar, or pope, presupposes widely accepted and well-​ recognized deontic powers associated with the position. Only then can cultural, political, economic, and sexual forms of capital be attained. (2)  In our historical milieu, the chief organizing system for the world’s human population is the nation-​state system. Searle observes thusly that national governments are “the ultimate institutional structure” (ibid., 161, italics Searle’s). Searle recognizes there are “enormous variations” in the power of governments: between strong states (Finland, Norway, etc.) and fragile states (Somalia, Haiti, etc.), and among different forms of government, e.g., “liberal democracies to totalitarian regimes” (ibid.). In principle, nonetheless, “governments have the power to regulate other institutional structures such as family, education, money, the economy generally, private property, and even the church” (ibid.).22 The two mechanisms that have historically given national governments their institutional preeminence are a monopoly of violence via its security forces (military and police) in conjunction with control over a more or less defined territory and all people within, powers that churches, corporations, and civil society organizations do not have (or, perhaps, no longer have, or do not have yet). The monopoly of violence is the foundational guarantee of states’ “superior status function,” and made manifest most explicitly when the state is existentially threatened from within or without.23 Searle notes, in addition, the project to align members of a “nation” with their own governing “state” has generated “much of the history of the past two centuries” because “there is no a priori guarantee that in any historical situation the boundaries of the nation and the boundaries of the state will coincide” (ibid.). Ethnonationalism defines who is included and excluded as part of “the nation,” what are the “natural” boundaries of the nation, and consequently, who the state represents. In turn, the self-​definition of the nation-​state produces conflicts, both internally (e.g., the difficulties Jews and Roma people have faced historically in European countries) and externally (e.g., the many ethno-​border conflicts on the Balkan Peninsula over the past century).

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Social ontology 231 (3)  The collective intentionality giving rise to status function Declarations in Searle’s theory of social ontology raises the question “why do people accept institutions and institutional facts?” (ibid., 107, italics Searle’s). On the one hand, status functions are necessary for human existence, given that they make possible human sociality, enable an expansion of powers, and make possible all the benefits of institutional intersubjectivity. On the other hand, considering the range and depth of unjust social arrangements across history and cultures, the question is begged why so many people “cheerfully accept institutions” that subordinate, repress, and exploit themselves and others (ibid.). Searle argues: One feature that runs through a large number of cases is that in accepting the institutional facts, people do not typically understand what is going on. They do not think of private property, and the institutions for allocating private property, or human rights, or governments as human creations. They tend to think of them as part of the natural order of things, to be taken for granted in the same way they take for granted the weather or the force of gravity. (Ibid.) The most significant ideological-​institutional force historically in the world, purportedly underpinning the constitution of familial, political, and economic institutions, is the various manifestations of a “divine will” (ibid.). As a supreme “intentionality” in the world (or universe), God sets the rules, dictates what is right and wrong, and hands out a plan for tribes, nations, or all humankind. In the same fashion, however, when God is no longer a “unit of analysis,” an existential yearning appears to remain for obligations, meanings, and values that are grounded outside or prior to human collective intentions. Rather than God, the power of “status function Declarations” is sought in “Nature” or “Reason” to justify social relations, because it provides transpolitical, “objective” justification for such arrangements. The history of thought is replete with fully discredited theories:  scientific racism, scientific sexism, social evolutionary models, or divinely ordained caste systems. This hydra-​headed tendency, however, continues in the forms of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and rational choice theory in political and economic sciences. The tendency in all these cases is a reductionism to a causal power outside of human intentionality that animates its concerns, and supposedly, in the final analysis, is responsible for basic social institutions and/​or forms of action.24 Warmly embracing Searle’s argument for the role of Declarations and collective intentionality with the DCR ontology of causal powers materialism cuts through the mystification of a “natural” or God-​ given social order. Obvious existential, ethical, and political ramifications follow.

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Notes 1 Bhaskar (1998, 25)  writes:  “I argue that social forms are a necessary condition for any intentional act, that their pre-​existence establishes their autonomy as possible objects of scientific investigation and that their causal power establishes their reality” (italics Bhaskar’s). 2 It is impossible to capture the complexity and richness of Searle’s full argument in a book chapter. I recommend all the works I cite to do justice to the many necessary omissions. 3 The human capacity to assign status functions is the direct complement to the capacity for “reflexive deliberation,” developed in chapter four. It is beyond the scope of this book to develop the relationship between the two; however, it does appear to me both reflexive deliberation and status function assignment are grounded in the structure of consciousness. If reflexivity is generated by the ability for “spatial-​temporal roaming” (as developed in chapter three), status assignment is also intimately connected to an intrinsic capacity and necessity of language and intersociality for humankind. 4 As argued below, Foucault ends up with an ontological structuralist account whereby subjectivity is totally determined by discourse. Bourdieu ends up with an ontological conflationist account whereby language and the symbolic-​social space are elided in praxis. Habermas ends up with an ontological dilemma. He argues language mediates the individual and society, but never is able to give an account of the process. Leydesdorff (2000) argues Habermas is aware of the problems of determination and volunteerism, and seeks to maintain an irreducible distinction between the linguistic powers of agency for intra-​and intersubjectivity on the one hand, and language as an external “integrating operator of the social system” on the other (ibid., 280). Habermas, however, does not specify how this “integration” works. These problems are solved once the prelinguistic causal powers of consciousness are made clear (as agency) in relation to the emergent causal powers of social forms, chief among them the self-​sufficient semantic powers of language. 5 Searle includes a third type of intentional state that is not germane to my discussion at this point, but which I will note because it is common. There are cases he calls “null” or “Presup” or “Ø” direction of fit. These are propositions where the direction of fit is presupposed, such as in the case, using his example (2010, 29), “John Searle is proud of his big nose.” In this case the facts are presupposed to be true. The proposition neither aims to represent a belief that Searle has a big nose—​ “John Searle has a big nose” (mind (word)-​to-​world direction of fit); nor does it represent an intention to bring about a change in the size of Searle’s nose—​“I am going to help John Searle’s nose grow in prominence by punching it” (world-​to-​ mind direction of fit). Searle’s “big nose is simply taken for granted” (ibid.). 6 Intentional states directed toward propositions per se, in contrast to intentional states directed toward the objects and states of affairs propositions represent, occur in situations such as in Freud’s belief that the oracle at Delphi’s command, “know thyself,” is an essential philosophical legacy in psychoanalysis. 7 I have more to say about the overlap of propositional content inherent to prelinguistic intentionality and language below, which will clarify this point. 8 To reiterate this point: “it takes a great deal of reflection to see that all of one’s beliefs and desires are representations of their conditions of satisfaction with a direction of fit. That is not immediately obvious phenomenologically…The notion of

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Social ontology 233 representation is sometimes challenged because people erroneously suppose that every mental representation must be consciously thought as a mental representation” (Searle 2010, 30). 9 It is precisely the fact of the biological features of sentience (or having integrated sensory experience) and self-​directed movement (or mobility) characteristic of animals that the capacities for perceiving and doing bestow on animals some basic efficacy as an animal, presupposing any attempt at “survival,” an “instinctual teleology,” or even “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 10 I have altered Searle’s example of a constitutive relation. He uses an example of himself and another person playing a duet, both of whom constitute a performance in virtue of their singular contribution. 11 In addition to Searle, Donati and Archer level their critique against several other philosophers they identify as employing (unjustifiably in their view) a shared and identical “we-​thinking” as the basis for “we-​ness,” or in other words, the “plural subject” (2015, 36–​49). 12 I say “precise,” but this does not mean true or sincere. How often is it the case that what people think or say is biased, wrong, or purposely misleading? In any case, the point is that language gives at least the ability to convert conscious intentionality into explicit propositions, even when it is an elaborate lie. 13 Searle argues that the “discovery” of functions in nature, such as “the function of the heart is to pump blood,” has an implicit value judgment in comparison to the brute fact, “hearts pump blood.” For Searle, the ascription of a heart “functioning” to pump blood “take[s]‌for granted that life, survival, and reproduction are positive values, and that the functioning of biological organs serves these values” (2010, 59). It appears to me Searle’s argument that there is a value judgment implied in a function arises from his definition of function as “a cause that serves a purpose” (ibid.) And for Searle, there are no intrinsic “purposes” to things existing in the world outside of those human create in their institutional life. I  disagree with Searle on this point, and, as I  will discuss in chapter eight, he ends up contradicting himself here. In his ontologically grounded defense of human rights, he argues that the biologically based capacity for speech acts has an intrinsic value to affect individual well-​being and flourishing—​a function in the world with a purpose not of human creation. It appears to me Searle’s skepticism about “functions with a purpose” is motivated by his holding to a distinction between something like a “biological purpose” and something like an “existential purpose.” In the former, the heart is a mechanism for circulating blood; its job is to perform this essential task for many animals. Whether or not there is an essential “positive” or “higher” purpose or value of a beating heart beyond circulating oxygenated blood in service to life is a question of its “existential function” in service to a value. If the arguments presented in chapter eight hold up, it appears again that, at least for a minute class of “things in the world,” the distinction between biological and existential functions is elided. 14 It appears in the development of Searle’s thinking that the concept he developed to identify the way in which language is necessary for collective intentionality to create and recognize institutional reality changed from the term “appropriate thoughts” (2003, passim) to “representation” (2010, passim). I find both useful to capture how a person must have “appropriate thoughts” to live within an institutional reality simultaneously to the fact that this reality must be “represented” as a field of deontological rights, powers, liabilities, etc. Despite “representations” to

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234  Social ontology the contrary, if somebody has “inappropriate thoughts” and acts upon them, they likely are institutionalized. 15 As a reminder, the prior discussion in this chapter examined how cognitive and volitive forms of prelinguistic intentionality in their respective modes can be transposed into conscious speech acts (or thoughts). I  used experiences surrounding giant sequoias in California to illustrate the point. 16 To prove that prelinguistic consciousness has propositional contents, Searle argues that “animals” have these “philosophical…categories” (2010, 67). He does not specify what he means by “animals”; however, within the context of his discussion, he is clearly referencing animals with higher-​order cognitive capacities, like most mammals, etc. Searle writes, for instance, “an animal that is consciously able to cope with the environment already has the category of object, or thing, because it can discriminate a tree or another animal from other features of the environment. It has the categories of space and time because it observes objects as located in space, and it experiences changes through time” (ibid.). 17 Searle’s claim speaker meaning is logically prior to conventional meaning is opposite to Lacan’s view of language and subjectivity. For Lacan, language determines the subject. Lacan is in error because he does not theorize (and ontologize) the role the prelinguistic structure of consciousness plays in cognition and volition in terms of propositional content, direction of fit, and conditions of satisfaction. Lacan’s focus on the subconscious is not the problem (and a focus I  think important). What is the problem is the Lacanian model of subjectivity precludes an ontological basis for reflexive agency. On the contrary, Searle’s theory of subjectivity, grounded in a prelinguistic structure of consciousness, entails a robust theory of agency because conditions of satisfaction of cognition and volition are either filled or unfilled—​a belief is either true or false, a desire fulfilled or unfulfilled. Beliefs and desires may be wrong, misguided, opaque, or self-​serving; however, they can in principle be translated in objective propositions, and consequently reflected upon and accepted or rejected. Most of our beliefs and desires are uncontroversial: today is Friday, I feel hungry, I am sitting in a chair, I am on earth, etc. Difficulties certainly revolve around our beliefs and desires pertaining to psychodynamics and sociopolitical relations for ourselves and others. But, to repeat a point made above, there is no a priori barrier to attaining better knowledge and transforming our beliefs and desires. 18 Consider the recent tendency, most noticeable among college-​educated men and women in metropoles and advanced economies (for those still even interested), to choose to delay marriage until their late 20s and 30s. There are many possible factors bearing on this shift:  the ubiquity of birth control, destigmatization of premarital sex, educational and occupational demands, changing gender roles, longer life spans, and so on. Whatever motivations and choices made by individuals (likely a subset of all factors in play in these choices, at both conscious and subconscious levels), a larger demographic trend emerges, as a consolidation (or “fallout”) of individual behavior. Implications of a fallout spread out, affecting other domains in society and creating other trends. Some of the effects of delayed marriage, of concern or celebrated, include having fewer children, greater risk of infertility, greater income for college-​educated women, and “the great crossover” in the US, whereby the median age for marriage has become higher than the median age for first births. Significantly, there may be trends or larger/​longer-​scale

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Social ontology 235 trends that have yet to be identified and represented, despite the power to exert their effects in subtle ways. 19 Searle’s exposition of “systemic fallouts” is focused exclusively on “unrepresented” consequences of lower-​level activity in order to philosophically justify the “truth-​ telling” capacity of social science to say something new about the social world. At the same time, just to clarify the point, systemic fallouts, by definition, do not go away or dissolve when finally “represented” by social scientists as a higher-​ order institutional fact. For instance, the Chinese state’s “one-​child policy” had the unwanted consequence of skewing China’s demographics, as parents favored boys over girls, leading to estimates there will be 30–​35 million more men of marriageable age than women in 2020. The gender imbalance is a systemic fallout that is now fully “represented.” The unintended systemic fallout of the one-​child policy will take years to rectify, even with the aggressive “deontological intervention” by state authorities to rebalance the gender equation. This example is one of many systemic fallouts involving demographic trends, such as birth, marriage, and death rates; patterns of education; and employment levels. These grand-​scale contours of a society can take decades to change if found lacking, despite being recognized, represented, and reformed through new status function Declarations. 20 Global warming is a paragon case of a systemic fallout of human energy usage, one whose recognition and acceptance as a new systemic fact is contested by those with (in)vested interests in energy production, and by many religious conservatives who see global warming activism as an attack on a divine order. The three strategies of those disinclined to accept global warming are to deny it is happening, deny humankind is responsible, or deny any form of political response because it would be too upsetting of the existing order. All three are explicit attempts to block any palliative deontological response to environmental degradation. 21 Even the dead have deontic powers associated with them. Dead bodies are densely enmeshed in legal and symbolic frameworks. The “dead body” immediately is granted a host of rights—​digging up graves, defiling dead bodies, leaving them exposed, and having sex with them are “grave” violations (sorry) and taboo. 22 The relationship between polity and economy is complex, and certainly we should not accept that the state by its nature is an a priori dominant organizing structure of human being. And while the emergence of the nation-​state system in the 16th century in Europe continues to unfold (it seems every couple of years a new nation-​state is formed), it is possible new, dominant institutions could emerge. Within the past 40 years of the “great stagnation” and the rise of neoliberalism, vying with the nation-​state as the “master institution” is the emergence of a globalized economy and its effects, especially as the profit imperative behind the financialization of the world economy remains unchecked to the point nation-​ states bow down before the dictates of capital with increasing supplication. 23 In the case of superpowers/​imperial powers/​hegemons, “state violence” is frequently evoked by threats to assets or challenges to control, often in other territories thousands of miles away. It is precisely the ability to project power internationally via military assets such as intercontinental nuclear missiles and sea and air power that determines who is and who is not a superpower. 24 Searle also argues (2008,108) that “a related and powerful motive for acceptance of institutions and institutional facts is the human urge to conform, to be like other people, and to be accepted by them as a member of the group, a sharer of collective intentionality.” This observation seems uncontroversial, and in large

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236  Social ontology part is the motivating factor behind the sheer ineluctable character of so much of social life—​people do not want to be nonconformist and outside the norm set by parents, peers, and their idols. I would add a third “powerful motive” undergirding the continuation of the status quo in institutional arrangements: the stiff defense of their properties and powers by elite classes, castes, and segments of a society who benefit from the status quo, deploying ideological and suppressive measures, usually to great effect.

Bibliography Andersson, Åsa. 2007, Power and Social Ontology. Malmӧ: Bokbox Publications. Badiou, Alain. 2007. Being and Event. London: Continuum. Bhaskar, Roy. 1998. The Possibility of Naturalism:  A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. New York: Routledge. Donati, Pierpaolo, and Margaret S. Archer. 2015. The Relational Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leydesdorff, Loet. 2000. “Luhmann, Habermas, and the Theory of Communication.” Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 17(3): 273–​88. Roberts, William A. 2002. “Are Animals Stuck in Time?” Psychological Bulletin, 128(3): 473–​89. Searle, John R. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press. Searle, John R. 2003. “Social Ontology and Political Power.” In Socializing Metaphysics: The Nature of Social Reality. Edited by Frederick Schmitt. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Searle, John R. 2008. Philosophy for a New Century:  Selected Essays. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John R. 2010. Making the Social World. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Barry. 2003. “John Searle: From Speech Acts to Social Reality.” In John Searle. Edited by Barry Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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8  Conclusion

Introduction Searle’s theory of social ontology, examined in the previous chapter, uncovers the role of status function Declarations and collective intentions in the origin of deontological powers. As Searle argues, all human institutional reality (constituted by the identities and positions of sociocultural and occupational forms of agency) has its basis in the logical operation of the Declaration. Searle’s theory, if correct, thus locates “a power structure common to all of social reality, and…the basic mechanisms by which that power structure is created and maintained” (2010, 202). Searle’s account, at least initially, seems to suggest that all moral/​ethical value is only sourced from collective agreements (intentions) to the terms of judgment over what is “good and bad” or “right or wrong.” In this way, Searle’s account could be construed as “deontological nominalism” or even “subjective idealism” concerning social institutional reality. This reading of Searle, however, misses a crucial addendum within his understanding of deontological powers, one grounded in human nature and thus manifesting “human rights.” Searle’s distinction between things “ontologically objective” (like a tree) and “ontologically subjective” (like money) maps onto the different ontological sources of a “human right” (as ontologically objective) and the rights, for example, of a police officer (as ontologically subjective). The ontological distinction between a tree and money is not controversial—​the specific powers (and liabilities) of police, mothers, tribal elders, vice presidents, etc. are clearly ontologically subjective in their nature (as opposed to the power of gravity, for example), and in the real sense of the term, “socially constructed.” What is controversial is the ontological status of human rights, human values, and ethical concepts like “virtue” and “dignity.” Are there actually ontologically objective grounds for these kinds of universal codes of human value, or are they fabricated like a conception of a unicorn? If deontological powers attach to human beings in virtue of being human, they are transcultural and transhistorical, viz., universal, and they ought to be recognized.

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238 Conclusion Searle’s defense of universal human rights rests on the “fact” human beings have particular capacities in virtue of their biological makeup, and these capacities deserve protection from interference by others. “Protection” in other words is a “right” and will be universally valid because of intransitive features of human nature. For Searle, human rights are “natural, universal, and equal” and can be derived with sufficient cogency that they ought to be recognized (2010, 180, italics Searle’s). Searle argues the fact this recognition is clearly not well instantiated in the present world does not mean axiomatically these rights are mere constructions. From a claim about human nature, basic rights can be established via a collective intention by Declaration to substantiate their normative effect. Searle’s point is that even “natural rights,” when granted (or recognized) as intrinsic to human beings or nonhuman beings, will always display the logical structure of “X counts as Y in context C,” because this structure concerns collective recognition as much as collective creation of a deontological power. This formula works out in non-​theological terms as “X” (the identification of a human being as such by virtue of their biological constitution) counts as “Y” (a member of the human race with inalienable rights) in context “C” (things in the world). The problem is, as Searle notes, “the justification for any rights that are assigned to beings solely in virtue of being human will have to depend on our [transitive] conception of what a human being is” (ibid., 192, italics, mine). This leads Searle to “doubt that there will be a definite list of human rights that every reasonable person can ascribe to” (ibid.).1 I agree that in “practice” transitive accounts of human nature are varied and contradictory, and the site of profound disagreement and antagonism among different cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions. The DCR philosophical materialist conception of human nature, however, posits there are emergent and real features of a human being, including the human body, the structure of consciousness, agency, etc. While DCR (transitive) concept-​ development of (intransitive) human nature remains an ongoing and fallibilist enterprise, the basic parameters of human nature, as this book has sought to uncover, are specific and clear. Moreover, it is precisely the existential openness of human nature (which DCR explicitly theorizes and phenomenological-​existential psychoanalytic theory presupposes), allowing for cultural and historical variation as well as personal and idiosyncratic variation, that has perplexed and confounded many theorists of the social world. This had led “thought trends” so often to entertain solipsism and nihilism on the one hand, determinism and constructivism on the other, and the backhand of authoritarian closure in all.

Human rights: universals or unicorns? Although Searle’s account has limitations (as I will discuss below), his “biological naturalist” argument for human rights provides a starting point that does not contradict the DCR conception of human nature, despite Searle’s

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Conclusion 239 relatively “flatter,” actualist account. With his trademark analytic clarity, Searle provides a set of useful criteria for understanding the nature of human rights. First, Searle points out that a “right” axiomatically entails an obligation “because all rights are rights against someone, and the people they are rights against have a corresponding obligation” (ibid., 178, italics Searle’s). For instance, a “right to privacy” obliges someone (everyone) to not intrude, spy, wiretap, etc. in personal spheres defined as private (one’s communications, body, home, etc.). Second, Searle employs the common distinction between negative and positive rights. Negative rights (or negative liberties) grant individuals a right of freedom from interference. They oblige others (e.g., governments, corporations, other people) to maintain an open space for the exercise of these rights by inaction or abstention from actions that would infringe on the exercise of the right. Searle gives several well-​established negative rights—​ freedom of speech, association, belief, and movement; rights to life, privacy, personal safety, and personal private property—​and advocates for a “right to silence” (ibid., 185). Searle argues that these are defendable and valuable negative freedoms all human beings should enjoy. A deontology of universal positive rights is much more problematic, and Searle is skeptical that universal positive rights can be grounded in a claim about a universal human nature. While negative rights call forth an obligation of inaction, positive rights call forth an obligation of provision. A positive right obliges others (e.g., governments, taxpayers, the universal community of humankind) to ensure that all members of the human race enjoy a defined benefit. In Searle’s view, an infamous attempt to establish universal positive rights is the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which makes the claim that: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-​being for himself and his family including food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. (Ibid., 184) Searle argues that the authors of this “profoundly irresponsible document… mistook socially desirable policies for basic and universal rights” because they failed “to reflect on the logical connection between universal rights and universal obligations” (ibid., 185). As Searle notes, to posit what are “socially desirable” ends (health, education, adequate standard of living—​a general well-​being of society) as universal rights qua obligations for human beings to ensure all other human beings enjoy these rights would require “a very strong argument to establish such a claim” (ibid., 184). Searle finds no problem with a polity (like Sweden or the “state of

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240 Conclusion California”) deciding to “guarantee all of its citizens the right to free medical care and the right to good housing,” for example, as a “legitimate exercise in state power” (ibid., 186, 193). The sine qua non of liberal democracy is to provide a “fairly fair” mechanism for self-​imposition of the rule of law. However, there is an ontological difference between a juridico-​political provision of a social good and a claim for a universal obligation to provide a social good (though, if the latter could be justified, the former would likely follow from a collective intention by Declaration). Searle is skeptical that a convincing argument can be made because it does not appear there is an objective ontological basis for one to be made. Mere assertion of a right like the UN Declaration only asserts a belief that it is a socially desirable good. Both negative and positive rights, if they are real, universal, and inalienable—​even ones supposedly “self-​evident”—​will require an ontological basis for their existence. The ontological basis of negative rights is relatively straightforward. The ontological basis of positive rights (if they exist) is more complicated, and I will say more below. Regarding negative rights, in Searle’s judgment, they are tied to capacities of human biological functioning. To exemplify this logic, Searle focuses on the elemental “right of free speech,” and ties this to the fact that human beings are “speech-​act performing animals” (ibid., 189). The right to free speech stems from this essential “characteristic capacity of self-​ expression…innate to us as a species. Recognition of the right to free speech is in part a recognition of the centrality of this feature of our lives” (ibid.). And here Searle has come to the crux of the argument: The justification for human rights cannot be ethically neutral. It involves more than just a biological conception of what sorts of beings we are; it also involves a conception of what is valuable, actually or potentially, about our very existence. (Ibid., 190, italics Searle’s) Searle makes a claim that human beings are essentially defined by their capacity to make speech acts and this is an ontologically objective fact about the world. The key question is the ontological status of the “conception of what is valuable…about our very existence” (ibid.). If the grounds of the “conception” are ontologically subjective—​that the “recognition” is founded no deeper than by a status function Declaration—​then the project to find human universal rights has failed, because a “right” has no more ontological basis than a “collective agreement” that it is a right. A true inalienable right exists independently from the vagaries of the thoughts and potential agreements of people. In DCR terms, “conceptions” are transitive and the “real” is intransitive. This requires an argument that the value of free speech is an emergent intransitive property of the capacity to make speech acts. We should remember the constitutive power of a status function Declaration is its ability “to impose function on objects and people where the objects and the people cannot perform the functions solely in virtue of their physical structure,” such as

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Conclusion 241 the deontological powers imbued in dollar bills and presidents (ibid., 7, italics, mine.). It appears Searle spoke too quickly and that in fact there is a special class of rights (manifesting deontological powers) attached to “people” that do function “solely in virtue of their physical structure,” as in the case of speech acts that exist outside of or below the deontological-​creating power of language and collective intentionality (ibid.).2

Virtue ethics I do not know if Searle would fully approve of the following argument, but I think that Searle’s account of negative rights relies on implicit precepts that have their point of origination within the Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics. To get his defense of human rights off the ground, Searle requires a “value add” to justify the rights in question. Using human nature as an ontological foundation for a normative ethics transposes a fact of human nature into a fact there is a value in human nature. Under this rubric, Searle first notes the “fact that human beings are speech-​act performing animals and the characteristic capacity of self-​expression is innate to us a species” (ibid., 189). However, this “fact” is not sufficient, in Searle’s view, to justify free speech as a universal right. Searle couches the human capacity for speech acts within a broader teleological understanding of human existence: But what then is special about free speech? I think the second feature that we need in our discussion of free speech is that we attach a special importance to our rational speech-​act performing capacities. It is not just that we have an inclination to free speech, as we might have an inclination to suck our thumbs. But rather there is something that we think is especially valuable, something essential to our achieving our full potential as human beings, in the exercise of free speech. (2010, 190, italics mine) Searle directly links free speech to human potentiality, which is predicated on a temporal dynamic constantly separating “what was,” “what is,” and “what could become” for each and all human beings. The relative openness of human existence and the existential problem of “self-​direction” is the condition of possibility to contrast the differences between the past, present, and future of subject-​agents. It is the task of virtue ethics to develop an evaluative schema, by which these differences can be contrasted. Moreover, the profound philosophical “move” of virtue ethics is to spotlight the execution of human practices3 as the ontological ground for human ethics. Rather than a list of abstract rules and laws given by an authoritative “universal decree,” virtue ethics is an earthly project to guide self-​direction (by employing practical wisdom or phronesis), to work toward achieving excellence in all practices (to pursue arete), and to fulfill human potentials (to flourish as a human being, viz., achieve eudaimonia). Moreover, the pursuit of virtue and eudaimonia

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242 Conclusion presupposes a shared and negotiated background of the properties, evaluative schemas, and conditions that form the definition of what “excellence” would entail, which highlights the importance of the sense of community garnered within a polis. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre defines virtues as “precisely those qualities the possession of which will enable an individual to achieve eudaimonia and the lack of which will frustrate his movement toward that telos” (1984, 148, italics MacIntyre’s).4 MacIntyre’s gloss of Aristotle’s definition of eudaimonia is “blessedness, happiness, prosperity. It is a state of being well and doing well in being well, of a man’s being well-​favored himself in relation to the divine” (ibid., 149).5 However: The exercise of the virtues is not in this sense a means to the end of the good for man. For what constitutes the good for man is a complete human life lived at its best, and the exercise of the virtues is a necessary and central part of such a life, not a mere preparatory exercise to secure such a life. (Ibid., italics MacIntyre’s) Phronesis (practical wisdom) is the “systematic training and principle” brought to bear on the “ordering [of] one’s emotions and desires, of deciding rationally which to cultivate and encourage, which to inhibit and reduce” (ibid.) “The educated moral agent must of course know what he is doing when he judges or acts virtuously. Thus he does what is virtuous because it is virtuous” (ibid., italics MacIntyre’s). By identifying what is virtuous, by “cultivating” healthy emotions and productive desires, the practices subject-​agents initiate are chosen in line and executed with virtue. To flourish entails there is value judgment, and virtue ethics is the discipline that considers right and wrong conduct, better or worse practices. What one does, how one does it, and the attitudes one takes toward the practice form the parameters of virtue. In MacIntyre’s articulation of the Aristotelian system, he defines “virtue” as “an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods” (ibid., 191, italics MacIntyre’s). In MacIntyre’s view, virtues stem from the relationship between two key concepts: the nature of a “practice” and how it enables the emergence of “internal goods.” Practices, as already alluded to, are: Any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved are systematically extended. Tic-​tac-​toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football

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Conclusion 243 with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the enquires of physics, chemistry, and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. (Ibid., 187) In addition: A practice involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well the achievement of goods. To enter into a practice is to accept the authority of those standards and the inadequacy of my own performance as judged by them. (Ibid., 190) And as such, “the authority of both goods and standards operates in such a way as to rule out all subjectivist and emotivist analyses of judgement” (ibid.). Practices enable internal goods to be realized because they are the necessary conditions of achieving success or excellence the specific logic of the practice entails. Playing a football game, farming, painting, and studying history each have their own conditions of success and/​or excellence. Internal goods include appropriate mental attitudes (dedication, courage, perseverance, etc.) and motivations (pursuit of excellence as defined by the practice, self-​transcendence, social bonding and building collective spirit, etc.).6 Moreover, there is a “second kind” of internal good that emerges from practices, a higher-​order good relating to “a certain kind of life” (ibid., 190). MacIntyre describes a “portrait painter” who devotes their life to the art, such that their practice defines their life, “as a painter” (ibid., italics MacIntyre’s). For example, Leonardo da Vinci as a “Renaissance man,” Steve Jobs as a “tech entrepreneur,” and Harriet Tubman as an “abolitionist” are individuals whose “practice of life” transcended to iconographic status and defined their respective vocations. Virtue ethics thus incorporates a “threefold scheme”: (1) “human nature in its untutored state”; (2)  “human-​nature-​as-​it-​could-​be-​if-​it-​realized-​its-​ telos”; and (3) “the precepts of rational ethics” (ibid., 53). Virtue ethics is the “teleological mechanism” through which untutored human beings become excellent/​successful human beings, by defining the nature of internal goods brought into being through practice. For MacIntyre, “ethics is the science which is to enable men to understand how they make the transition from the former state to the latter” (ibid., 52). Moreover, there are two essential qualifications in MacIntyre’s account. First, internal goods by definition are “qualities contributing to the good of a whole life” (ibid., 273). Virtues are never identified in the singular (like playing the air guitar) and many “modes of human conduct” are either self-​defeating or, while useful in particular contexts, do not translate to promoting a whole life. The internal goods must be generalizable from a singular practice to other domains of one’s life.

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244 Conclusion MacIntyre writes, “the unity of a virtue in someone’s life is intelligible only as a characteristic of a unitary life, a life that can be conceived and evaluated as a whole” (ibid., 205). For instance, “perseverance” in learning to play the clarinet becomes a characterological disposition to “persevere” in other practices. On the contrary, a degree of “recklessness” may be an “internal disposition” necessary to be a good test pilot, but fails the requirement of generalizability in other practices (like creating long-​ term relationships). Second, the acquisition of internal goods in a practice must be generalizable for the community as an “archetype” of the emergent values, commitments, strengths, etc. that have enabled the excellence/​success on display. The effect may be highly circumscribed, as for those watching a chess game in the park, or almost universally recognized, like the virtues displayed by Olympic gold medal winners and FIFA world champions. Virtue is lost in cases such as a gold medal winner caught taking performance-​enhancing drugs, losing both their medal and public esteem. The telos depends upon reflexive deliberation and acts of will to be actualized—​subject-​agents must “think through” and “act out” their projects and routes to flourish. Virtue ethics is expressly the “algorithm” or “evaluative matrix” by which better or worse decisions and social forms can be judged by their readiness to encourage or repress human flourishing. Consequently, reflexive determination over best courses of action to flourish presupposes both desire-​dependent and desire-​independent motivations and reasons for actions. Subject-​agents have to make choices and plans; they have to impose self-​discipline and follow projects through to completion. In effect, the pursuit of virtuous conduct toward flourishing is a desire-​dependent motivation underlying (or desiring) self-​ imposed, desire-​ independent parameters of action (as virtuous). The human telos and virtue ethics are not separate; the act of pursuing one’s telos to flourish is always simultaneously to act in a virtuous way. Like social forms, virtues thus both enable and constrain subject-​ agents in their pursuit of flourishing. Consequently, the teleology of human existence to flourish is ontologically identical with the processuality of human existence. These are not separate dimensions of reality (one real, one affective, as the spurious “is-​ought” division would suggest) because the teleological value of flourishing is embedded in the practice of existence, such that practice without an ethics is nothing more than animal instinct, the actions of toddlers (at least mine appeared thus, ahem), or the will-​less life of a “zombie.” On the contrary, there is an intrinsic relationship between the human being of real individual people and the human telos to flourish. MacIntyre writes, the “Aristotelian theory of the virtues…presuppose[s]‌a crucial distinction between what any particular individual at any particular time takes to be good for him and what is really good for him as a man” (ibid., 150). And thus, the meta-​ethical basis of virtue ethics (its onto-​ethical force) derives from “the telos of man as a species which determines what human qualities are virtues” (ibid., 184). Flourishing as an essential focus of the human “species being” operates as a universal template

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Conclusion 245 by which each individual human being can self-​evaluate and evaluate others and evaluate the social conditions under which people’s practices are enabled and constrained.

Virtue ethics and/​or deontology? As discussed in chapter six, Searle’s account of the formation of deontological powers by status function Declarations explains how the powers, rights, obligations, meanings, etc. of sociocultural and occupational forms of agency are constituted. Searle’s account relies on the distinction between “desire-​ dependent” and “desire-​ independent” reasons for actions (with reasons having an emergent, irreducible causal power to cause agential actions) to explain how deontological powers work and why people follow rules, act dutifully, fulfill their obligations, and enjoy enhanced social powers. The telos of human being (as will be further explained below) operates at a lower level of emergence, and is the animating power that governs the capacity for reflexive deliberation of human agency. The “will to flourish” as a “virtue ontology” is the origination of a value that advances the cause of “being” over “non-​ being” and “well-​being” over “ill-​being.” If this is correct, its value informs every moment within a lifetime and throughout a social system. In one sense, the telos to flourish has a similarity to Lacan’s concept of the big Other, discussed in chapter five, as a regime of conduct.7 The “ego ideal” of the human telos, however, does not evoke a neurotic response.8 Unlike various cultural or social “ego ideals” under the sway of a big Other (thou shalt “do this and be that” of some external authority—​a problem both Lacanian and existential psychoanalytic theory grapple with), virtue ethics does not define the “end point” in strict deontological terms, but rather is concerned with enabling subject-​agents to define their own “ends” and provide an ethic to guide their deliberations, projects, and practices in ways that remain responsive to the well-​being of others. The human telos to flourish thus encompasses the identities, ego ideals, concerns, and projects negotiated and exercised in the course of a life, and ultimately must guide these “higher-​ level” ways of being human. The touchstone of virtue ethics thus provides Searle’s account of negative rights with an ontological basis: a virtue ethic toward human potentiality and flourishing. It furthermore suggests a “deeper” purpose to many of the types of social forms and deontological powers discussed so far. If human rights are emergent values that emanate from human nature, they interlock with deontological powers, because the basic human agential powers and capacities that negative rights protect presuppose the exercise of deontological powers. The relationship between universal negative rights and deontological powers is not accidentally identical in structure to the relationship between human agency and sociocultural/​occupational agency. The former (negative rights and human agency) are conditions of possibility of, and logically prior to, the latter (deontological powers and sociocultural/​occupational agency).

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246 Conclusion Human agency evokes the values of negative rights; sociocultural/​occupational agency evokes the values of deontological powers. And here it should be repeated:  only DCR emergent powers materialism has the explanatory power to give a full ontological account of agency, power, and value. When the full implications of virtue ethics are incorporated into Searle’s account of deontology, it mutatis mutandis enables a richer and broader understanding of how and why human beings create ethical/​deontological systems: in service to the potentiality of human life, social-​deontological powers enhance the teleology of human flourishing. This is obviously a best-​case scenario, because many (if not all) deontological systems of societies and cultures in the world are infused with deontological powers that thwart or repress the flourishing of various peoples (through hierarchical social ordering and overt legal repression; by custom and tradition; etc.). But whatever the case, it suggests the domain of virtue ethics exists at a more fundamental ontological level, underneath the types of status function Declarations that create the social world, one to which “social ontology” in its general sense is the appropriate “level of study.” It might be argued that this link between virtue ethics and deontological powers is too abstract or specious, but even a cynical view (and not too unwarranted) must accept that the capacity of status function Declarations to create human deontological powers is not brought into being to create social systems/​polities that are by design dysfunctional, self-​undermining, or “voids of despair” (though they may be by unintended consequences or repressive social structures, e.g., North Korea).9 Human social systems, in accordance with their cultural logics in operation, have an impetus to continue, grow, and thrive in some general sense. Consequently, just as the human history of transitive “thoughts and theories” about the intransitive world is a history of error, gross misunderstandings, and subconscious “will(s) to power,” DCR exposes another iteration of transitive shortcomings, this time toward the human telos. Perhaps only men, Caucasians, upper castes, or high totem members are recognized as those with actual potentials of teleological completeness within the cultural logic. Whatever the “token” logic, by type they fail by design or error to extend a universal sensibility to all members of the polity, and by the same axiom, to all human beings.

Virtue ethics and/​or human rights? MacIntyre argues that “the virtues are precisely those qualities the possession of which will enable an individual to achieve eudaimonia and lack of which will frustrate his movement toward that telos” (ibid., 148). Nonetheless, as the driving force determining “virtuous conduct,” what is the ontological origination of the human telos? This is a significant question, and MacIntyre does not give a definitive answer, more than a vague ontological claim that human flourishing is a function of the human species being. This ontological imprecision is the source of a curious discrepancy between Searle and MacIntyre.

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Conclusion 247 Searle defends negative human rights with an implicit reliance on a notion of a human telos to flourish. MacIntyre is a forceful advocate for virtue ethics of human flourishing, but converse to Searle, argues human rights do not exist; they are a figment of human imagination. What gives? MacIntyre writes: It would of course be a little odd that there should be rights attaching to human beings simply qua human beings in light of the fact…that there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression “a right” until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400, let alone in Old English, or in Japanese even as late as the mid-​nineteenth century. (Ibid., 69) Moreover: The best reason for asserting so bluntly that there are no such rights is indeed of precisely the same type as the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no witches and…unicorns: every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed. (Ibid.) It should come as no surprise Searle explicitly engages with MacIntyre’s supposed refutation of human rights in Searle’s defense of human rights, summarized above. Searle argues that MacIntyre’s “skepticism” can be answered in two parts (2010, 176). First, in apparent agreement with MacIntyre, is the claim that “the universal right to free speech did not exist before the European Enlightenment, at which time it came into existence” (ibid., 177). This statement is true because a “right to free speech” had never been identified and transmuted into a deontological power by a status function Declaration until a point in history. Nonetheless, this historical fact does not contradict Searle’s second claim that “the universal right to free speech has always existed, but this right was recognized only at the time of the European Enlightenment” (ibid.). Searle argues that despite a “surface appearance of differences” between these two statements, they can be reconciled when they are understood ontologically. Nobody would claim that the deontic duties to drive on the left side in Great Britain or drive on the right side in France are anything but conventions based on contingent “pathway-​dependent” reasons. In MacIntyre’s view, “human rights” in actuality have no deeper ontological status, despite their appeal to universality (it would be like believing God said “thou shalt drive on the left side of the road” and thus cast right-​side driving as a sin). MacIntyre views “human rights” as fictions that were created as part of the Enlightenment philosophical project to liberate autonomous individuals from the confines of aristo-​theological hierarchy (the “Great Chain

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248 Conclusion of Being”) and influenced by the new scientific tendency to an atomistic-​ reductionist method. In Searlean logic, MacIntyre’s mistake is to assume the fact human rights discourse emerged in modernity entails that it is a fiction, a social construction with a purely subjective ontology, akin to dollar bills and baseball rules. As DCR would understand, intransitive reality is brought into human consciousness by transitive knowledge claims; whether the intransitive reality of human rights discourse has an objective ontology or a subjective ontology is the dividing line between Searle and MacIntyre. Because of the referential detachment of intransitive reality from transitive knowledge, it is logically possible for human beings to not perceive, comprehend, or institutionalize human rights through a status function Declaration. As noted above, however, Searle thinks there are cogent arguments in favor of recognizing “natural, universal, and equal” human rights (2010, 180). My discussion of Searle and MacIntyre, as you may have noticed, is committed to a somewhat ironic logic. I  have employed Searle to defend human rights, but note he requires something like MacIntyre’s account of virtue ethics (in the form of a human telos) to complete his argument. Simultaneously, Searle criticizes MacIntyre’s rejection of human rights (2010, 175–​76) because it does not follow from the fact human rights discourse emerged in a particular place and time in history (Western Europe and early modernity) that they are fictions (false universals) and thus ungrounded, unproven, and ultimately ideological. To square this conflict, I  think there is a mutual entailment of human rights and virtue ethics, and rather than an either/​or, true/​false problem, they can be reconciled by understanding that they emerge from and activate different “ethical powers” at different (and thus non-​contradictory) ontological strata. In Searle’s defense of human rights, he argues that a universal capacity for speech acts, beliefs, movement, etc. both is definitive of human nature and is not a morally neutral observation about human nature. This is the case because its intrinsic value to being human emerges from its importance to human flourishing, “actually or potentially” (2010, 190). As I put it above, the “value add” is a teleological view of human nature, opening the door to an explicit re-​evaluation of Searle’s argument in light of virtue ethics. MacIntyre situates the teleology of flourishing as always emerging in time and space, in concrete settings, and exercised in concrete practices that are defined by the modalities of agency. MacIntyre’s self-​ascribed “socially teleological account” conflates the universal telos to flourish by virtuous conduct with its manifestation in specific practices (ibid., 197). This is, using Archer’s terminology, an instance of “upward ontological conflation,” because the telos to flourish is a function of the free, unhindered exercise of transfactual human capacities, which predicate the development of virtues emerging from practices. The problem arises from not keeping track of the ontological strata and their different, irreducible emergent powers. MacIntyre smuggles in an un-​ontologized account of human capacities, and does not adequately

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Conclusion 249 account for their sui generis powers as a separate stratum from human subjectivity (of actual beliefs and desires) that manifest actual concerns, projects, and reasons subject-​agents hold for the practices they undertake. It is not automatically a problem to assume human agency, and MacIntyre is no “structural ontologist” or “cultural determinist.” Virtue ethics is clearly dependent on capacities for reflexivity, first-​person perspective, and self-​directedness over concerns, projects, and practices, among others. MacIntyre’s repudiation of human rights as akin to unicorns and witches is driven by a de-​emphasis on human capacities, thus precipitating a failure to recognize two vital and interlocking features:  (1) capacities are necessary conditions for flourishing outright; (2)  before any practice-​cum-​virtues can take place, a social space (right of being) must be allotted, however minimal or constrained. The public “generalizability” of virtuous conduct is ontologically dependent on the types of capacities Searle discusses, which I  have termed “human agency.” Of course, functionally, sociocultural forms (and to a much lesser extent, occupational forms) of agency are the conditions of possibility for human agency to actually manifest by way of enculturation/​socialization. Searle argues that while all rights entail obligations, not all obligations entail rights.10 However, in the exercise of practices (whatever they may be in different cultural and historical settings) the “community,” or whoever is relevant to the setting of the practice, has been (in Searle’s sense) obligated to allow the practice to take place. This may be a banal obligation, like “obliging” someone to play chess in the park, but in fact a “right” has been granted or respected, however indifferent one might be to the fact of the chosen practice (and indifference is the moral stance of acceptance). The point here is that at the level of a “universal human telos to flourish,” grounded in some facts of human nature, the right to exist may be non-​codified, unthought, or indifferently assumed, viz., de facto in existence and operation. At the same time, the right can be denied de jure. The analytic problem is to separate out an “ontological right of being” from a “deontological right of practice,” considering that in liberal societies, for instance, the right to play chess in the park has a host of legal and cultural protections. The danger is reifying “universal liberal values.” Just because a collective Declaration has codified negative rights with a claim to universality, it does not mean those rights are really ontologically justified.

Ethical universals MacIntyre’s attempt to reconstitute virtue ethics in After Virtue coincides with a thorough evaluation of the Western/​modern philosophical project to find an indubitable basis for moral judgments and ethical conduct. MacIntyre traces the impetus for the Enlightenment project to the decline of religion as the unifying cultural force in society. In the vacuum, philosophy sought to provide a new “shared background and foundation for moral discourse and action” (ibid., 50). However, the attempt to develop “a rational justification

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250 Conclusion of morality” was compromised because its “internal incoherence ensured the failure of the common philosophical project from the outset” (ibid., 51). MacIntyre locates the central problem as the refusal to envisage “untutored human nature” (which all ethical schemes presuppose at bottom) without a corresponding concept of “human-​nature-​as-​it-​could-​be-​if-​it-​realized-​its-​ telos.” A human nature considered only in stasis, as a “being-​in-​itself,” will inevitably lead to the three paradigmatic strategies espoused by Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard, all of which are ultimately incoherent and unsatisfactory. MacIntyre’s historical contextualization of the project to find a foundation for morality and his analysis of its failure are worth understanding in full (ibid., 36–​78). However, the essence of MacIntyre’s argument is that all three take a conception of human nature; assume from the outset basic Christian principles regarding sex, money, and power are the proper “ways of ‘Man’ ” (Hume is downright reactionary in this regard); and attempt to provide rational foundations for these principles. For this provision, Kant turns to “rules of reason”; Hume turns to the passions; Kierkegaard turns to an existential choice to live a life either guided by reason (the ethical life) or guided by passions (the aesthetic life) (ibid., 52). Hume’s and Kant’s antithetical positions on human nature turn on their respective arguments for the ontological priority of the passions or reason. The “categorical imperatives” of reason impose moral duties in Kant’s view; reason is the “slave of passions” in Hume’s (like passions for patriarchy and private property!); Kierkegaard tries to negotiate the power of both reason and passion, and locates the foundation of ethics in the choice over which power will have priority in one’s life (and of course, most sober, rational minds will choose reason). There is something “reasonable” about highlighting the passions and reason as potential grounding for morality: both are highly salient in existential and phenomenological terms for the human condition. Thinking and desiring are ever present and definitive of human experience. However, they cannot provide a rational basis, “because of an ineradicable discrepancy between their shared conception of moral rules and precepts on the one hand and what was shared—​despite much larger divergences—​in their conception of human nature on the other” (ibid.). In MacIntyre’s historical analysis,11 early modern philosophers concluded that reason can no longer “comprehend essences or transitions from potentiality to act” (1984, 54). Instead, “reason is calculative; it can assess truths of fact and mathematical relations but nothing more. In the realm of practice therefore it can speak only of means. About ends it must be silent” (ibid.). This “self-​imposed” limitation on “thinking about the world in real terms” is, in DCR terms, a consequence of philosophy and science being unable to transcend the limitations set by the epistemic fallacy and ontological actualism, thus blocking a depth ontology predicated on transfactuality and emergent powers materialism. It is a limitation brought about by “a more and more unrestricted version of the claim that no valid argument can move from entirely factual premises to any moral or evaluative conclusion” (ibid.,

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Conclusion 251 56). The problem, thus, is that “the whole point of ethics—​both as a theoretical and a practical discipline—​is to enable man to pass from his present state to his true end” (ibid., 54). With a broad stroke, modern philosophy eliminated any consideration of human beings in terms of their potentiality identified by a telos. Removing the telos from consideration of human nature leaves only an “untutored” state and “precepts of rational ethics” (ibid., 53). The content of ethics (the “to-​do list”) for Kant and Hume, without a telos, thus has to rely on a positive and univocal conception of humans’ untutored state. The a priori motivation of Western philosophy is to rationally justify the “ethics” of conservative Christianity and of the propertied classes. These ethics are subsequently conflated with and definitive of the intrinsic nature of “untutored man.” The first result is that “ethics” is not concerned with potentiality and flourishing, but about following universal rules. The second result is that “virtue” is not “to be practiced for the sake of some good other, or more, than the practice of the virtues itself,” but rather a virtue is practiced as an end in itself, “its own reward and its own motive” (ibid., 233). MacIntyre argues that the central consequence of the failure of modern philosophy to provide a rational basis for morality is the ascension of emotivism, which by default has become the dominant theory of morality. It roots are Humean and couple “desire” to his skeptical empiricism, resulting in the “boo-​yay!” theory of moral claims. All meanings of all moral judgments are nothing more than an expression of opinion, personal whim, and/​or hidden motives. In MacIntyre’s definition, “emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character” (ibid., 11–​12, italics MacIntyre’s). These expressions “are neither true nor false; and agreement in moral judgement is not to be secured by any rational method, for there are none” (ibid. 12). However, MacIntyre argues that “emotivism thus understood turns out to be, as a cogent theory of use rather than a false theory of meaning, connected with one specific state in moral development of decline, a stage which our own culture entered early in the present century” (ibid., 18). As a potential theory of meaning, emotivism is ultimately nihilistic, solipsistic, and relative. As a theory of use, however, it describes the “state of grave disorder” stemming from “the various rival and heterogeneous moral schemes which compete for our allegiance” (ibid., 1–​2). Against this disorder, MacIntyre seeks to re-​ establish virtue ethics as the rational basis for a common understanding of good conduct and value, thus reconnecting and reordering our societies. MacIntyre’s critique of modern philosophy’s newfound unwillingness to countenance “being-​as-​becoming” and to analyze being in terms of its “transitions from potentiality to act” is significant because it is identical with the DCR project to restore an ontology of generative mechanisms and causal structures to their rightful place within “Western comprehension” of the world. In MacIntyre’s view, this is precisely the error Hume and Kant make in their joint elimination of understanding the potentiality of being to act, which,

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252 Conclusion in the classical-​Aristotelean tradition bearing on ethics, “involve[d]‌at least one central functional concept, the concept of man understood as having an essential nature and having an essential purpose or function” (ibid., 58).12 The Aristotelean view of moral judgments relies on functionality. By analogy, using MacIntyre’s example, a watch that is functional, fulfilling its purpose, is a “good watch,” being “the kind of watch someone would choose who wanted a watch to keep time accurately (rather than, say, to throw at the cat)” (ibid., 59). The designation of “good” transposes an evaluation as a “factual statement” because it is a truthful assessment of its purpose and function. The same holds true for social roles: a farmer, parent, president, and so on. Each social role is defined by a function and purpose: growing food, raising children, wielding executive power. Each can be evaluated in terms of fulfilling their function: growing a lot of high-​quality food, raising successful children, providing effective leadership. And well-​“functioning goods” are generated through the exercise of virtuous conduct. MacIntyre argues the philosophical rejection of teleological reasoning pertaining to human conduct entailed ripping morality out of its classical sociological context. In MacIntyre’s view, this rejection unmoored morality and ethics because “when man is thought of as an individual prior and apart from all roles that ‘man’ ceases to be a functional concept” (ibid., 59, italics mine). The “roles” MacIntyre refers to are all sociocultural and occupational forms of agency, with functions tied to practical pursuits and deontological powers. And to reiterate, it is through the identification and practice of a function that the performance can be judged and internal goods reaped. However, I want to stress that MacIntyre’s account of virtue ethics is a sociological account. Virtues are exercised through existing social modes of agency, as a chess player, farmer, parent, etc., and through them, subject-​ agents pursue the telos to flourish. While this is true, the MacIntyre/​Searle fault line between their respective arguments for and against “human rights” suggests that a universal ontological foundation of human flourishing is operational in addition to the sociological foundation of human flourishing. It is crucial to distinguish the different ontological strata of human agency (qua innate capacities) and sociocultural and occupational forms of agency (qua deontological powers/​functional capacities). Social roles can be identified in terms of their specific functions (to perform the task well) and human beings conceptualized in terms of their universal function (to flourish).

Universals concretely considered for even the meanest understanding Despite the ascendancy of emotivism as the default ethical theory presently in vogue, its relativistic implications are a philosophical dead-​end. DCR seeks to establish a universal conception of moral truth with a rational basis that can both transcend the multiplicity and flux of the world and dialectically embrace the specificity of time and place. Kant’s attempt to ground moral truths in the logical consistency granted by reason is an extension of the

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Conclusion 253 philosophical quest to uncover abstract universals, such as the famous trifecta of “the good, the true, and the beautiful” as higher-​order categories which “ground” all particular manifestations of the paragon. Within the Western philosophical tradition, for Plato, Aristotle, et  al., ultimately God/​nous is required as the ontological source of the abstract universal. Kant continues this traditional logic and fully embraces the revelation of Christian precepts, but proposes that reason, as a means to truth in its own right, could independently justify/​verify God’s ethical strictures for humankind. Kant’s categorical imperatives have as their essential moral and logical force to “always act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of others, as an end, and not as a means” (ibid., 46). MacIntyre notes this injunction, operating as a “test” of right conduct (to treat others as ends and not means), is well emplaced within the Western philosophical canon, going back to at least Plato. However, Kant sought to establish the validity of the claim upon a foundation that has the same logical necessity as the laws of mathematics, which are discoverable by reason and indubitable by their internal coherence. The problem is that, unlike the logical force of a mathematical statement such as 2+2=4: Kant gives us no good reason for holding this position [to always treat others as an end]. I  can without any inconsistency whatsoever flout it: “Let everyone except me be treated as a means” may be immoral, but it is not inconsistent and there is not even any inconsistency in willing a universe of egotists all of whom live by this maxim. (Ibid., 46) MacIntyre also notes that categorical imperatives to “ ‘Persecute all those who hold false religious belief’ and ‘Always eat mussels on Mondays in March’…can be consistently universalized” (ibid.). These immoral and “trivial” imperatives would fail Kant’s test of conduct and are “certainly and obviously…not what [he] envisaged” as universal moral truths discovered by reason (ibid.). However, Kant’s project collapses because there is no rational basis to differentiate “real” moral maxims from the immoral and trivial. This is so because of a deeper problem: reason alone cannot provide a set of reasons granting a rational basis for moral judgments. If reason alone cannot provide a basis for moral judgments and a guide for ethical conduct, it might appear that the claim of emotivism is more than a description of our morally fragmented historical epoch, that in fact there is no rational basis for moral claims upon human conduct, and any “claim of morality” is nothing more than “sophisticated disguises for self-​love, seduction, and predatory enterprise…by which each individual, each class, consults his or its desires and to satisfy them preys on each other” (ibid., 47–​48). MacIntyre argues that virtue ethics can provide such a basis, and DCR correctly incorporates virtue ethics within its axiological system, grounded in transfactual capacities of human being and parameters set by the nature

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254 Conclusion of human existence. The DCR theory of universality, thus, is not abstract but concrete. The ontological grounding of concrete universals refutes the implicit idealism and subjectivism of strong cultural relativism, that ultimately “anything goes” because moral claims are nothing more than a “will to power” by solipsistic individuals and social constructions/​cultural norms. The claim for concrete universals also rectifies the failure of Kantian universal moral imperatives, grounding the claims of DCR moral realism not in the abstractions of reason but in the “real,” experiential world. The linkage between MacIntyre’s account of virtue ethics and DCR social theory is based on the shared centrality of projects and practices for social reproduction/​transformation on the one hand, and for the emergence of internal goods on the other.13 MacIntyre’s immanent practice/​virtue ethics interlocks with the Archer/​DCR framework of morphogenesis/​transformational model of social activity, both in terms of agential motivation to achieve internal goods and the necessity of preexisting social forms providing activities for and criteria by which internal goods can be achieved. At the same time, DCR provides a vastly deeper and more explicit account of the ontological premises that MacIntyre draws upon, and rectifies his tendency to conflate the powers of human agency per se with sociocultural/​occupational forms of agency per se (as noted above). The immanence of practice (as only existing in socially embedded, geohistorical contexts and through the actions of reflexive and embodied subject-​agents) consequently is a key component of the ontological basis for concrete human universals. Foremost, concrete universals incorporate both the universal human impulse to flourish expressed through practice and real people in history and sociocultural milieus with unique characters and experiences, engaging in the practices of life in the larger project of making a life. The “universal” and the “particular” connect, giving proper due to their powers and contexts. For DCR, the mediating concept is the four planes of social being, which (to repeat) defines human being by four constitutive relations (with self, other, social institutional, and material transactions with nature). Human existence is predicated by (1) a relation to nature (to the body, of biological needs, sustenance drawn from the world around, and earth as a foundational “condition of possibility” for human existence); (2)  a relation to an intransitive social institutional matrix of forms and structures, especially of language and deontological powers associated with social structures of identities and roles; (3)  a social context of interpersonal relations of family, friends, coworkers, enemies, strangers, etc.; (4) an intrapersonal field of introspective awareness, personal narratives of identity, and a subjectivity revolving around sets of beliefs and desires, formed around an emergent “self ” stemming from the structure of consciousness. These four relations are both universal (every human being has them) and concrete (they are found in the world, in the here and now, and always in play). The four-​planar model incorporates the dialectics of “being, becoming, and be-​going” once negation and difference are ontologized. To recount from

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Conclusion 255 previous chapters, an ontological account of natural necessity in relation to generative mechanisms and causal structures is wedded to temporality, as a processual “tensed” process. For the planes, once temporality is incorporated, every past moment becomes an unchangeable/​irreversible intransitive history. The legacy of the four relations is both the “conditions of possibility” and “structure of conditions” for each present moment, and, ad infinitum, for future moments. At the same time, the temporal unfolding of the four planes means that all possibilities in the future are relatively open and undetermined. All things are caused (ubiquity determinism), but in open systems in the “real world,” things are not predetermined (regulative determinism). For subject-​agents, the structure of conditions is reproduced or transformed through their projects and practices; their reasons are causes of actions, and while conditioned are not determined by regulative causal powers (akin to Sartre’s arguments against “psychological determinism”). Once social forms pass into the domain of intransitivity, they can be referentially detached and “subjected” to transitive knowledge claims (and mistakes). Through reflexive deliberation and first-​person authority over knowledge, subject-​agents can reevaluate their concerns and change their projects and practices. The concrete universality of the four planes of social being, consequently, can be considered as four constitutive “relational meta-​practices” and subject to the teleological charge to promote human flourishing. Each holds the potential for internal goods to be developed within specific practices inscribed in each relation. Concrete universals, consequently, are immanent to being and only manifest in the activities and concepts of human doing, saying, and making in the world. Likewise for the universal human telos that transfactually “blesses” human beings and their societies. On the one hand (as with Searle above), the telos provides a definitive value to human capacities in their practice (like free speech, association, etc.), thus providing a meta-​ethical foundation for negative rights, and, by obligation, it demands for itself an onto-​ethical-​political space for flourishing. On the other, the telos dictates what are virtuous projects (those that promote development of internal goods) and determines the virtues that can emerge from practices (competitive spirit, temperance, amicability, courage, sympathy, etc.) appropriate to achieving excellence/​success (arete) by their logic. When the Platonic “high-​ floating” parentage of abstract universals is supplanted by a realist, materialist, processual, fully immanent understanding of transfactual emergent powers and causal structures, any and all moral values and ethical prescriptions can only be derived from these conditions. Thus, immanent, concrete universals do not entail “universal rules…[but] rather, universal needs and potentials, rights and freedoms at the level of the real…which, however, are only ever manifest in particular mediated and singularized forms, and which actually existing norms may more or less adequately express” (Hartwig 2007a, 491). In opposition to abstract universalism, for DCR, “there will be universal rights and freedoms in eudaimonia

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256 Conclusion but they will be historically specific, concretely singularized and open; the norms enshrining them will be the norms of the communities concerned” (ibid., 492). Concrete universals are “means orientated to these agents in these contexts in these processes—​assertorically, not categorically, imperatival or prescriptive” (ibid., 492, italics Hartwig’s). DCR is in agreement with the key parameter of abstract universalism: individual actions must be consistent with universal principles, “provid[ing] both a test for theory-​practice consistency (hence sincerity) and a criterion for the truth of what you are saying” (ibid., 491–​92). The problem is that “universal categorical imperatives” have, in Searlean terms, no objective ontological reality in and of themselves. As a priori formulas about how people should judge their actions, they presuppose identical and decontextualized universal subjects without “regard for the concrete and for specific differences (e.g., in ability), assuming that ‘ought’ implies, rather than presupposes, ‘can’ ” (ibid., 491). This latter assumption is subtle, but directly addresses the difference between abstract and concrete universals. An abstract universal implies the “ability,” thus ignoring context; a concrete universal presupposes the ability, thus factoring in the context. For example, there are going to be, at the very least, different “abilities” for people of different ages (children, adults, and elderly) and differences of contexts that inform the appropriate “ought to do” contrary to absolute and abstract injunctions (not holding small children responsible for their actions, lying to stop a murder, disobeying a law in the interest of justice, breaking a promise to keep a more important promise when conditions change, etc.). In contrast, concrete universals, and the moral judgments and ethical injunctions that emerge from them, are dialectically intrinsic to specific people and their contexts. There is a point of tension and indeterminacy that exists between a meta-​ethical position of moral realism (the teleology of human nature to flourish) and the way this meta-​ethics is transmuted into sociohistorical contexts and localized further to accommodate the specificity of each individual subject-​agent. However, there is sufficient analytical clarity given by a virtue ethics of flourishing to identify healthy people and expedient social conditions for flourishing. The larger point is that a concrete ethics is not a “one size fits all,” thus requiring a sensitivity and flexibility in application.14 “Human flourishing” as an ontological basis underpins nearly infinite possibilities of fulfillment, given the vast array of sociocultural-​historical conditions of existence and individual inclinations within these conditions.

Human nature The foregoing exposition of virtue ethics, the role of practice in their exercise and acquisition, and the relational parameters of practices within the four planes of social being is definitive of concrete universals that underlie DCR axiological claims bearing on a universal definition of human nature. Searle brought human nature to the fore of his theory of negative rights, a nature

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Conclusion 257 centering on basic human biological capacities, like intersubjectivity and speech acts. They are definitive capacities of human nature, grounded in the structure of consciousness and the emergent capacity for reflexive deliberation. However, defining human nature solely in terms of these capacities presages ontological individualism. Here, the only recognized ontological powers are derived from human biopsychology, considered as discrete, individual capacities all human beings share. While recognizing human capacities is a necessary and real grounds for ethics, as with the case with Searle, capacities are insufficient without a “value add” given by an ethics of flourishing. Such an ontology of ethics, however, remains insufficient because it is reductionist and relatively atomistic. A capacities-​based account disavows or obscures intrinsic social predicates and relational conditions of individual existence that are as much a part of actual “human nature” as human capacities. On the contrary, the concrete universality of the four planes consequently lays the groundwork for a claim of moral realism that identifies human flourishing as originating from a causal structure, i.e. human nature, which binds the innate capacities of humankind to social predicates and relational conditions as essential components of this structure. This “non-​ discrete, relational” definition of human nature provides an ontological foundation for mutual obligations beyond a mutual “respect for individual rights to flourish.” In other words, Searle’s skepticism about “positive rights” can be addressed; Bhaskar’s oft-​repeated claim that “the free flourishing of each is a condition of the free flourishing of all” indeed is true; and by theory-​practice consistency, an ethical commitment to eliminate constraints on human flourishing for oneself and others is ontologically grounded. The DCR stratified ontology of human nature provides a complete account of the conditions of human flourishing that, in addition to a recognition of human capacities, incorporates (1)  the alethic truth of intransitive social forms; (2)  the emergent identities and deontological powers attached to sociocultural and occupational forms of agency; (3) the relational goods (and evils) stemming from intersubjectivity and social structures; and (4) the symbiosis of individual ethical transformation and social transformation. The four concrete universals of human nature given above correspond to (or are entailed by) the DCR definition of “human nature” (Hartwig 2007b, 243–​44). First is a “core universal nature” that consists of the structure of human consciousness, the capacity for reflexive deliberation of human agency, embodiment and bipedality, and all other basic features of homo sapiens (ibid.). The second element is a “historically specific nature” that is largely derived from sociocultural forms of agency that are a necessary precondition for actualized human beings by their entry into a socio-​symbolic field of a given time and place (ibid.). This is an effect of the social forms that condition the four planes of social being. People need culture and social structure, and the marks of being alive in a particular culture, historical epoch, socially structured “location” (being a serf or being lord of the manor, for example) in combination give rise to radically different types of subjectivities; they are

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258 Conclusion why a 15th-​century Māori commoner and a 21st-​century Syrian refugee are different but at the same time share a universal experience of being embedded in time and social space. Third, human nature must include the fact it manifests “unique individualit[ies]” that all people—​even twins—​are existentially singular in form, emerging from the combination of sets of unique experiences and innate personality traits derived from DNA (ibid.). Fourth, human nature is intrinsically “processual” in internal and world time (ibid.). Human nature is processual in the biological sense of maturation from being a newborn baby, hitting puberty, and aging unto death. Its processual by its lifetime consumption/​production matrix in the daily practice of securing basic needs. Human nature is also processual in the sense of developing new concerns and projects and outgrowing, abandoning, or “crying uncle” on others. People are constantly changing themselves—​for better or for worse—​learning new skills, traveling, or engaging in self-​destructive behaviors. Granting for the moment the ontological significance of a “core universal nature,” the processual dynamic of human nature is arguably the most consequential for DCR philosophical anthropology. Human being is characterized by its becoming and be-​going through each relation in the four planes, which DCR characterizes as imbued with an immanent latent teleology of praxis toward freedom from absences and constraints. This DCR teleology of praxis draws on Spinoza’s psychological theory of conatus as the human disposition to strive to persevere in one’s being. Conatus is the dynamo DCR employs to characterize the human desire to flourish through the relations of the four planes of social being. The teleology of praxis in DCR terms is ontologically prior to (or constellationally embeds) human flourishing in MacIntyre’s “socially teleological account” of the pursuance of internal goods (1984, 197). MacIntyre’s conception of flourishing tends to revolve around sociocultural and occupational forms of practices (being an artist, chess player, police officer, etc.) that offer the possibility to express and develop virtues in line with the human telos to flourish and for their generalizability, both intra-​and intersubjectively. In contrast to MacIntyre’s restricted definition of “practice,” the DCR conception of a teleology of praxis employs an inclusive definition of “practice” that covers all “saying, doing, and making” by subject-​agents, ranging from the banal and mundane (wiping the tabletop to “negate” the children’s spillage) to historical events like a political revolution (negating the power of corrupt elites/​foreign interlopers) to world system events like the development of communication and transportation technologies (negating temporal and spatial constraints).15 In these cases, absences (clean table/​political freedom/​ easy movement) are negated through individual or collective praxis, absences that are immanent and contextually derived from present conditions of existence for particular people at particular times. In addition, this broad “praxis teleology” includes and encompasses all “practices” that have the institutional structure necessary to provide the possibility for virtuous conduct, in terms of developing and achieving skills, talents, creative arts, knowledge, etc., which is the same as overcoming/​negating their “absence” in life.16

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Conclusion 259 Human processuality is thus inherently teleological. There is no stasis: to be is an activity of negating and becoming, and one that has a “rudder.” Subject-​ agents strive toward a future where present-​day (or minute, hour, month, year, lifetime) absences are “absented.” It is a dialectical process because the directive force of the human conatus only emerges through extant conditions, which are intransitively diverse and always changing. Desire propels this process. The “world-​to-​mind direction of fit” of desire is to change the world from what it is to a different world. In its outward appearance, desire is an individual attribute, and the wellspring of ontological individualism and its research methodology. People are cast as individual “desiring-​ machines” or “utility-​driven rational actors” as voters, consumers, networkers, users, etc.17 Many structural features of Western “late modernity”—​fragmentation, atomization, and deterritorialization—​mirror the legal, normative, and culturally ascribed fictions of “frictionless” volunteers who choose their destiny and their nature. We moderns seem alone, powering our way in life, practicing “self-​help,” “mindfulness,” and “self-​pimpification” in the free market. Meanwhile, Western conceptions of the human condition foreground individuation (e.g., Jung), aloneness (e.g., Sartre), or the reduction of all forms of human activity to cyclical labor to procure basic needs of food, water, shelter, and protection in the life of each (e.g., Arendt, in critique). One of the fundamental arguments coursing throughout this book, however, is that independent causal powers (contrasting efficient and material causality) of agents and social forms are structured by their temporal relationship. Social forms (combining the duality of a Cultural System and social structures) are necessary predicates for human agency to manifest through sociocultural and occupational forms of agency, and hence for the material causal power social forms grant. Human agency (emerging from the structure of consciousness: spatial-​temporal roaming, referential detachment, imagination, reflexivity, an X-​spot “self,” and volition) is undetermined because of the ever-​occurring and ineluctable “nothingness” into which consciousness falls forward. Despite any initial appearance, the existential freedom the structure of consciousness grants is not a causal structure justifying ontological individualism (viz., downwards conflation). On the contrary, a second fundamental argument coursing throughout this book is that sociocultural and occupational forms of agency derive their coercive/​normative power out of the structure of internal relations that defines and empowers/​disempowers social positions vis-​à-​vis other positions because they mutually constitute one another. Internally related social positions have a dyadic essence, varying degrees of dependency, and a power dynamic that can be symmetrical (friendship, an “equal marriage,” among teammates, etc.) or asymmetrical (master-​ slave, patron-​ client, parent-​ child, etc.). Internal relations are found on all four planes of social being (e.g., humankind has an internal relation with the natural world, though with an exceedingly one-​ sided dependency—​our dependency).18 The key plane for internal relations is the plane of intransitive and emergent institutional structures because it is through their intransitive existence that human beings “inherit” (from birth)

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260 Conclusion necessary predicates for human agency to “actualize” (but not sufficient for its actualization).19 Institutional structures are constituted by deontological powers given by status function Declarations. They are the foundational institutions that give shape to the sociocultural sphere and govern human beings, and (as somewhat reified analytical concepts) include basic institutions of family, polity, economy, religion, ritual, and law. They reflect deep transitive assumptions about the nature of human differences (patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc.; racial, ethnic, cultural “essences,” etc.). They are shaped by histories of geopolitical, religious, economic, and ideological struggles for power. They are endlessly rationalized, critiqued, and modified. The larger point, which predicates the remaining arguments of this conclusion, is that human being is a relational being constituted by social-​structural positioning by ascription and aspiration. Formative beliefs and desires, vested interests, identity, and deontological powers revolving around the “individual self ” are derivative from social-​structural positioning on the one hand. They also provide the conditions for the production of their stasis and antithesis in thought and action—​they are the “subject” agents either reproduce or transform at hand. Social structures breed contradictions of competing interests, power differentials, exploitation, and debasement. When contradictions cut through existing social relations they provide an impetus (realized or not) to alter the structural configuration and overturn the status quo. People may get depressed, apathetic, and unsupportive passively; they may abide contradictions, defend power, and justify debasement actively; they may become angry, activist, and revolutionary aggressively. The social ontological significance of institutions cannot be overstated because it is by their means, as organized modalities of deontological powers, human power is created—​the power to do, make, and say actually. The human praxis teleology thus to negate absences and realize internal goods in the project of flourishing is conditioned by these modalities. The praxis of procuring basic necessities and satisfying desires through projects to negate absences is inherently social and profoundly conditioned by existing intransitive sociopolitical-​economic arrangements. When people experience absences and lacks that constrain their freedom or pose existential threats, and which are neither self-​inflicted nor pathologically induced, social mechanisms and causal structures responsible are implicated and sought out through research, theoretical development, investigative reporting, etc. The teleological impetus, the conatus of human being, seeks to overcome and transform whatever is the cause(s) of the absence, be it unfair laws, false beliefs, crimes, and/​or exploitive social hierarchies. The “condition of satisfaction” of “desire fulfillment” necessarily spreads out in ever-​expanding circles of concern, seeking its fulfillment in the relevant social, political, and economic structures. The impulse to freedom from absence and constraint is not, consequently, a self-​centered or inherently egoistic enterprise which incidentally includes other people and their absences only when the same. The DCR claim is much stronger. It calls for a mutual recognition of the rights of self and others

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Conclusion 261 (including the nonhuman world) to flourish. It calls for a mutual commitment to refashion human institutions that support generalized master-​slave type relations (which DCR terms power2 type relations, in contrast to the “general causal powers of human agency” or power1), whose internal relations enable forms of “domination, subjugation, exploitation, and control” (Morgan 2007, 372). It calls for personal ethical transformation as the necessary complement to social institutional reform.

What is a person? If people were naturally virtuous there would be no need for any discussion of virtue ethics or human flourishing because knowledge, truth, and practice of virtuous conduct would be collapsed into one. However, people are not. The DCR transitive/​intransitive distinction shows the world is disjoined from knowledge and hence the “concept-​dependence” and “activity-​dependence” of social forms on agents may or may not coincide with true knowledge about the world (usually coinciding with a mixture of lies, half lies, and statistics). The problem, of course, is that knowledge and understanding of intransitive features of reality can be misunderstood and actively denied. Transitive knowledge production is socially embedded, easily politicized and manipulated, and under pressure to cohere with (by not contradicting) other enshrined “truths” about the world delineated by epistemic horizons of culture, religion, ideology, etc. Historically and cross-​culturally, definitions of human being have routinely (if not a 99.9% failure rate) misrecognized and consequently miscategorized people by extensive reification of “types” of people into (almost inevitably) hierarchical categories of personhood. People’s sociocultural and occupational positions (whether defined by race, class, gender, caste, patrilineal/​matrilineal descent; Platonic souls of gold, silver, bronze, and iron; etc.) are understood, imagined, theorized, and/​or imposed as “natural” and “real” features of the social world. The distinction also underlies failures on the plane of self-​knowledge to recognize intransitive features of ourselves. Wombs do not wander the body wreaking female disorders; self-​reification by mauvaise foi denies the human existential condition of being-​for-​itself; juridico-​political construction of atomistic individualism grants ideological cover for subjugation and exploitation born from actual relational subjects and collective denial of this fact. The DCR wager is that a critical, realist, ontological, and processual-​ dialectical account of the world (especially social and psychoanalytic theoretical accounts) will yield truth—​concepts grasping reality—​and consequently social forms will resolve into true concepts and good activities simultaneously when people resolve to identify and live in accordance with their nature. The DCR definition of human nature apprehends major themes discussed in this book: the structure of consciousness, agency, social forms, and subjectivity that constitutes the subject-​agent. However, only with a teleological understanding of the processuality of human nature is the DCR philosophical

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262 Conclusion anthropology complete, and “real people” emerge with reflexivity, concerns, projects, and practices, and enter into relations with others to pursue emergent goods through common projects, shared dreams, and mutual enrichment. To better grasp the nature and structure of human relationality, I turn to Christian Smith’s DCR-​informed theory of personalism, explicated in his book What Is a Person? In Smith’s definition—​which he admits is “unwieldy”—​a person is: [A]‌conscious, reflexive, embodied, self-​transcending center of subjective experience, durable identity, moral commitment, and social communication who—​as the efficient cause of their own responsible actions and interactions—​exercises complex capacities for agency and intersubjectivity in order to develop and sustain his or her own incommunicable self in loving relationships with other personal selves and with the nonpersonal world. (2010, 61)20 All capacities, powers, and identities of a person revolve around the center of subjective experience to form a “single, coherent, existent life” (ibid.). It is no accident Smith’s theory of the person makes an identical ontological claim to the claim Searle, Husserl, and Sartre make concerning an “X” position in the structure of consciousness that oversees the capacity for temporal and spatial roaming of past, present, future, and imaginary states of consciousness. This X position is an irreducible, emergent first-​person position and the seat of the ontological power of human agency: the reflexive self. The “reflexive self,” however, as a “bare bones” centerpiece in the structure of consciousness, becomes a person in the social world. In its concrete singularity, the person—​as a center of subjective experience—​consolidates past memories, present experiences, and future plans, into a (more or less) unified subjectivity that is defined by one’s identity, beliefs and desires, capacities, and powers in the social world. The experience of being a “person” also integrates the ontologically distinct powers of human agency, sociocultural agency, and occupational agency because their interlocking causal powers and mutual conditioning draw them together in a “phenomenologically unified” sensibility. Smith’s argument accords with MacIntyre’s central argument that virtue ethics concerns the unified self: For a virtue is not a disposition that makes for success only in some one particular type of situation…; the unity of a virtue in someone’s life is intelligible only as a characteristic of a unitary life, a life that can be conceived and evaluated as a whole. (1984, 205) All human capacities, identities, and roles are subsumed under the same common teleological directive. This is not to say that subject-​agents always

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Conclusion 263 (or even usually) experience full integration, unification, and coherence as a person. MacIntyre, Smith, and DCR contend, nonetheless, that the experiences of heterogeneity, incoherence, alienation, and absences in life are personal and social “system failures” to be negotiated and overcome.21 As introduced by Searle above, Smith’s account of personhood relies on a foundation of human capacities that can be considered in the abstract. He provides a schema of 30 human capacities, ranging from existence capacities (like “subconscious being,” “conscious awareness,” and “volition”) to creating capacities (like “creativity, innovation, and imagination,” “material cultivation and development,” and “identity formation”) to highest-​order capacities (like “forming virtues” and “interpersonal communion and love” (ibid., 54).22 They are emergent and provide the unique causal structure of human being as a subject-​agent. They are the transfactual conditionals of being human, which DCR understands as inherent causal power tendencies. While lowest-​level capacities are for the most part always operational, like subconscious being and conscious awareness, higher-​order capacities are much more dependent on acts of volition to manifest themselves. They may or may not be realized by choice or the ways in which external social conditions enable or constrain a choice. Capacities for innovation, material cultivation, or forming virtues, for instance, require effort and conditions of possibility. They require “actually existing” social predicates and intersubjectivity for their concrete expression in time and place. These capacities, especially creative and highest-​ order capacities, are the emergent basis for human flourishing. Through their expression and actualization—​via fundamental capacities of reflexivity and self-​direction—​ the praxis teleology to negate absences is directed into the world, and virtue practices are tackled to obtain internal goods. Human capacities provide the parameters of human functioning, and by definition, thus, the condition, quality, actualization, and effectiveness of human functioning can be objectively recognized. As the four-​planar model of social being entails, there will always be a dialectical mediation between “universal human capacities” and the specific sociocultural conditions under which idiosyncratic individuals falter or thrive. In the “final analysis,” the dialectic between human capacities and their functional possibilities and the four planes provides the only immanent ontological resource for moral realism and a universal ethics revolving around human flourishing. The structure of 30 human capacities that Smith outlines provides an emergence basis for the person. To recognize oneself as having a “conscious, reflexive, embodied, self-​transcending center of subjective experience” demands an axiomatic recognition that all other human beings also have a center of subjective experience with identical structural features of consciousness, innate capacities for reflexivity, and a common praxis teleology underpinning their concerns and projects (ibid., 61). All in all, these intransitive features of human being are universal emergents that constitute the powers

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264 Conclusion and conatus of human being. It follows from these facts, in Smith’s view, that they demand an additional transitive recognition that: The promotion of the realization of the personhood of other persons is always included in the natural telos of every person pursuing the realization of his or her personhood. In other words, an innate part of any person’s quest to achieve the flourishing of his or her personal being is—​given the relational nature of personhood—​to likewise advance the flourishing of the personal being of other persons. (2010, 406) The crux of the issue centers on the theory of the “relational nature of personhood” and how the conatus of self-​flourishing necessarily binds one to others in its pursuit and extends an ethic of recognition on their behalf. In this way, an ethics of flourishing would entail an ethical commitment to the well-​being of others, and by a similar extension to the nonhuman world. The obverse would be an ethic that prioritizes self-​care and individual well-​being. A  self-​ centered ethic would authorize competitive zero-​ sum gamesmanship in promotion of one’s self-​interests and justify the instrumentalization of other people as objects, tools, or material resources. Competition (agon) among equals, grounded in mutual respect, and found in sports, games, and ideal conceptions of democratic mediation of conflicting interests, has a legitimate place in human relations. These types of competitive arenas are highly regulated and voluntary, and, most importantly, enable all participants to express their powers and potentials in line with an ethic of virtue (to employ phronesis in pursuit of arete and ultimately eudaimonia). In contrast are those social arenas/​contexts (from the local to the global), whether regulated or deregulated, in which hierarchical power dynamics and asymmetries of symbolic and material resources structure social relations. The key mechanism underlying hierarchical and asymmetrical social structures is that they force (condition) involuntary participation with high costs of extrication. This is true for both “alpha” and “beta” positions (though alphas generally have greater opportunities to move, flee, change jobs, remake themselves, etc., costing them only their former “alpha” position). Asymmetries, hierarchies, and inequalities are “fairly” inevitable in human societies, based on differences of age, experience, knowledge, talents, and effort. What are not “inevitable,” however, are those inequalities based on a priori categorical ascriptions that justify differences of deontological powers pertaining to identity (for race, gender, etc.). Nor are structural inequalities of wealth and power that self-​perpetuate, monopolize, seek strategies of exclusion, and seek to “naturalize” themselves. Smith writes: Seeking to develop the personhood of others cannot be instrumentalized into a means/​ end calculus driven by the purpose of enhancing our

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Conclusion 265 personal good. That kind of self-​serving calculating turns the other from a person into a means that is useful for our own benefit. (Ibid., 408) Casting the other as a means to our ends is to dehumanize them, and places the other in a subordinate position to us. Because the other has accepted being turned into a means by force, guile, and/​or powerlessness, however begrudgingly, unwittingly, or desperately, the effect for the other is to accept a relationship that sacrifices some of their possibilities of flourishing for some benefit to us (benefits of sex, money, power, time, labor, esteem, and so on). Treating others as a means compromises one’s project to flourish. Condemning others as morally, intellectually, or “spiritually” inferior also compromises one’s project to flourish. This is not some sort of karmic comeuppance to be suffered in the next life, but rather material, intellectual, and social “costs” borne by the “perpetrators of racism, sexism,…heterosexism” and other forms of power2 relations (Sue 2010, 112). Treating others as a means ingrains a failure to see the world as it is, disavowing (momentarily or permanently) that the other has an identical human telos to flourish in their own right. Dehumanizing others (as whores, mongrels, inferiors, etc.) is grounded by ideology and/​or psychodynamic rationalizations. Science, theology, folk beliefs, and good old “common sense” have all, at times and in places, reflected and justified degrees of arrogance, narcissism, false senses of superiority, and the objectification of self and other by fixed essences. Worlds divided by those who have value and those who have less value underpin social hierarchies and institutions with subject positions and vested interests that subject-​agents reproduce. By disidentification and marginalization, unequal power dynamics are accepted as part of the “natural order of things,” which then reinforces the institutional structures that perpetuate the conditions for exploitation, marginalization, and/​or violence to continue. The cost, however, is “losing one’s humanity for the sake of power, wealth, and status attained from the subjugation of others” (ibid., 132). It creates an obstacle to establish progressively deeper relationships with others and the nonhuman world. It creates artificial cognitive barriers, diminishing perceptions, and constricting experiences. It extends irrationality, moral complacency, and transitive illusions. Other cultures, other people, and “other thinking” are set out of view, placed behind a wall, or belittled. Other people are objectified, instrumentalized, and appear to exist for one’s own benefit. It is admittedly a broad and abstract claim the human telos provides critical leverage against the (usually) interlocking processes of dehumanization and exploitation. The essential logic of power2 relations, however, points to the origin and constitution of an entire human history of generative mechanisms and causal structures developed to extract value from some humans to enhance the power of others. In addition, there is a “fractal-​like” structure to power2 relations that can manifest in interpersonal, institutional, intranational, international, and hemispheric relations (and between human and

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266 Conclusion nonhuman forms of life). The exercise and advantages of power2 relations implicate “masters” (in all their forms) with respect to how individuals and groups (by race, class, caste, gender, sexuality, geographical/​hemispheric position, etc.) are defined and enabled to enhance their power to the detriment of other individuals and groups. However, who is a “master” is always relative to the particular social institution under scrutiny and the nature of its relations so organized.23 In all cases, the DCR ethical axiology contends that transitive errors and/​or theory-​practice inconsistencies are part and parcel of power2 relations. Relations on the planes of social being, when grounded in truth and consistency, and shaped by mutual recognition and support for universal human flourishing, are the material emergence basis for ethical agency.

The ethics of relationality There are two arguments that extend the recognition of flourishing as an “individual, personal project” to a recognition that it commits one to the “flourishing of all.” The first argument makes a return to Donati and Archer’s theory of the relational subject. A commitment to human flourishing for all is demanded by a recognition that to be a human being is to be a relational subject. As discussed in chapter six, Donati and Archer show that relational goods are actualized through the complex of relationships people have with others (as friends, lovers, parents, civil society members, etc.). Relational goods can be equated to the “ends” of various “projects” and/​or the pursuit of “internal goods” subject-​agents undertake in the course of their lives via intersubjective forms of “practice” with others. Smith makes a similar point concerning the intersubjective nature of emergent persons, foregrounding the role of exchange: The good of personhood is pursued and realized primarily in and through social relationships—​through reciprocal and selfless exchanges of good gifts of myriad kinds; through shared efforts to advance the strengthening of the common good of all; and through communion and love among friends and intimates—​all of which are crucial for achieving the true, good end of flourishing personhood. (2010, 411–​12) At the same time, relational subjects produce relational evils, some intended, many—​ and often the most pernicious—​ unintended and hence unknown. Relational evils directly undermine human flourishing and can emerge on all four planes of social being. Donati and Archer argue that in the close quarters of interpersonal relations (like a couple, in their example), “the major cause for the generation of relational evils is their failure to develop a modus vivendi together or the intervention of contingencies damaging their way of life” (2015, 74).24 Unmet or conflicting needs and desires, financial distress, drug addition, mental illness, etc. are all triggers of potential relational

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Conclusion 267 evils (resentment, passive-​aggressiveness, adultery, emotional and physical abuse, separation, etc.) as both parties reflexively deliberate their individual concerns and projects in relation to the co-​concerns and co-​projects founded with the other. Concerning general human flourishing, the more significant kinds of relational evils are ones that emerge on the social-​structural/​institutional plane and through humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Donati argues that relational evils are created and/​or reproduced, for instance, by “the acquisition of merchandise produced in violation of human rights” or “the involuntary creation of poverty” (ibid., 294–​96). So too are the relational evils brought about by burning of fossil fuels, depletion of topsoil, overuse of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizer, and loss of habitat for flora and fauna. Relational evils emerge out of the projects and practices subject-​agents undertake, bearing on consumption choices, occupational duties, institutional participation, political support for particular domestic and foreign policy agendas, and all other projects and practices that directly or indirectly induce relationality with others (including the nonhuman world). Moreover, the production of relational evils has nothing to do with human intentions per se (though it can). Relational evils can arise from the actions of honest, responsible, “good intending” individuals because unintended and unknown evils emerge from their “system participation.” All human beings are generally imbricated in structural relations at the global macro-​level (modes of production, the nation-​state system, and global political economy) and in relations at the meso-​level (intranational and regional socioeconomic structures, etc.). While it is “transitively possible” to deny responsibility for the creation and reproduction of negative consequences of relationality, the “relational realist” claim is that causal responsibility is actual, indubitable, and binding. Donati writes: The moral responsibility for the creation of…[relational evils] does not have to do with the individual behavior of single persons, but with the consequences of the relations that they activate. They are responsible for the outcomes because they are responsible for the relations that generate them, even if these are emergent effects that come about without their direct intentions. (Ibid., 296) As a consequence, as Smith notes, “necessarily it is impossible to split personal morality from social ethics” (2010, 412). For example, the purchase of a commodity sitting on a shelf in a store thus in effect supports and tends to reproduce the relationship between labor and capital involved in the commodity’s production. The buyer now has an internal relationship to the material conditions of production. If the frozen peeled shrimp I buy at my local grocery store was shelled by slaves chained to their work table in Thailand, my purchase of this shrimp provides financial support for the

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268 Conclusion continuation of the conditions of production because of the profits from the sale. My purchase provides an impetus for the business of shrimp-​shelling with slave labor, reproduces the comparative advantage of slave shelling, and signals my grocery store to buy more shrimp from this source. My purchase of shrimp also provides impetus for the continuation of all environmental impacts of shrimp farms or overfishing the sea, and any other unintended consequences of the production and distribution of these shrimp. I may be unaware of these relational evils; I may deny that I am morally responsible for slavery and environmental degradation in Thailand; but the relational nature of being a subject-​agent entails my causal responsibility for supporting this distant exploitation and accompanying effects. Causal responsibility for the emergence of relational evils (and goods) ought to become undeniable moral responsibility once knowledge of the causal linkage is made from one’s projects and practices to their systemic effects, however unintended. The “choice,” however, to recognize the “right to flourish” of others, and reforming one’s concerns and projects to mitigate dehumanizing conditions (structured by power2 relations), requires further support. As an “ontology of the ought,” the second argument for the imposition to acknowledge a moral responsibility for universal flourishing revolves around Erving Goffman’s theoretical work concerning the presentation of the self. Smith quotes Goffman to argue in the course of intersubjective relations subject-​agents make “moral demand[s]‌upon others, obliging them to value and treat [them] in the manner that persons of [their] kind have a right to respect” (2010, 483, quoting Goffman 1959, 13, italics mine). This is so because “society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way” (ibid.).25 For instance, being an adult male imposes a moral demand on others to be treated like an “adult” and “male” in accordance to how these categories and social positions are defined. Likewise, in formal institutional hierarchies (militaries, churches, businesses, etc.) one’s rank or position engenders specific powers and obligations to others with higher and lower positions. In the esoterica of the Catholic Church structure, an apostolic exarch has precedence over an apostolic prefect, and both are obligated to treat each other as such. Likewise, in militaries, officers order sergeants around, and sergeants order their squad around. Respect for “persons of their kind” at the outset is a recognition of the deontological powers associated with social positions of the person: male, female, adult, child, officer, or sergeant. Smith makes a case, however, that the “moral demand” stemming from deontological powers attached to social categories and positions is not just a flat, semiotic understanding and recognition of the meanings and values attached to various categories and social positions as constituted by status function Declarations and enforced by formal and informal rules, laws, and/​ or punishments. Smith argues there is an additional value of dignity, as an

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Conclusion 269 emergent moral depth within human being, that underlies and warrants the moral imposition of sincerely presented social characteristics. We respect the judge in the court of law qua human being with 30 capacities. We respect the judge’s deontological powers pertaining to law because those 30 human capacities must function (we hope) in a healthy and effectual way in the exercise of their legal judgment. The 30 capacities are a causal structure from which the person emerges with a telos to flourish and a moral imposition of dignity. Self-​presentation of dignity and recognition of the other’s dignity (and vice versa) is necessarily an intersubjective dynamic, involving “ongoing reciprocal self-​definitions, the credibility of moral identities, [and] the mutual recognition of personal worth, propriety, and integrity,” viz., mutual recognition of the other’s dignity (Smith 2010, 483). At the center of the relationship is a theory-​practice dynamic:  if the freedom and allowances required for one’s own project to flourish are rightful (thus imposing an obligation), without inconsistency, transitive error, and false consciousness, one must offer the other the same rights of freedom and allowances for their own respective project to flourish. Likewise, the ethical agent cannot ask for freedom for themselves while effectively denying freedom to others from oppressive conditions. They cannot reject being treated as “means” for somebody else’s “end” while simultaneously exploiting a power differential for their own advantage. This first step or underlying “moral basis” to intersubjectivity can be retranslated as a mutual recognition and respect for one another’s “human agency.” It is the recognition of the other’s intrinsic and inalienable powers of human being, their telos to flourish, and an emergent subjectivity expressed in their concerns, projects, and practices. This moral basis prefigures a “second step” of recognizing all the sociocultural and occupational forms of identity and agency (cultural background, group membership, social positions, etc., and as friends, lovers, comrades, colleagues, representatives, etc.) that each person “self-​presents.” Insincere self-​presentation, pathological motivations, and/​or coercion brought into a relationship between self and other are precisely a failure to respect one’s and the other’s “personal worth, propriety, and integrity,” viz., the dignity of being human (ibid.). Without mutual recognition of the dignity of all parties, the inconsistency of seeking moral validation for oneself and denying it to another creates social breakdown, resentment, resistance, and ultimately a false consciousness that one’s moral worth is actually justified. The entitlement to true and real respect for one’s “moral imposition” of the self on the other (and not from fawning, kowtowing flattery, begrudging lip service, threats of violence, etc.) is based on the other’s “gift” of acknowledging one’s own dignity, and only granted with one’s own gift of acknowledgement of their dignity.26 Thus, the basis for all non-​pathological human relationships is a “commitment to reality and truth” (ibid.); a recognition that dignity is an emergent property of the self as a “center of experience”; and the axiom of theory-​practice consistency, which requires that a belief in one’s own right to a moral imposition of

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270 Conclusion the self (vis-​à-​vis the other) must be extended to a belief in the other’s moral imposition of themselves (vis-​à-​vis us).

Everything is broken Christian Smith’s definition of the person, and the preceding discussions on virtue ethics, could be accused of entailing vague and individualistic promises of “positive psychology” and the distasteful mouthfeel of “self-​help” schemes. A  decontextualized and unhindered “self-​transcending center of subjective experience” with capacities for things like “loving relationships with other personal selves and with the nonpersonal world” appears boundless in potential (2010, 61). Smith notes, “the creature described above portrays an ideal representation of a person—​well capacitated, adjusted, adequately coherent, balanced, empowered, and sociable” (ibid., 75). Smith, however, argues: “if we want to understand human persons and social life adequately, we will have to account not only for powerful capacities and conditions of personal thriving but also what…we might call brokenness” (ibid., italics mine). Brokenness characterizes the “disorder or alienation” that is ubiquitous in the world. It describes the individual experience of and social conditions pertaining to the vast array of violence, destruction, and suffering that has plagued the human condition (ibid.). Mental illness, drug abuse, obesity, interpersonal conflict, ethnic violence, geopolitical struggles, collective punishment, ecological destruction, and mass extinction are a mere subset of the dimensions of brokenness. They bespeak people’s individual struggles to flourish in mind and body, personal failings, moral weaknesses, and selfish disdain for others. They bespeak deleterious social conditions undermining collective flourishing because of global governance and regulatory failures, the externalization of costs, iniquitous wealth capture, and international power politics. They bespeak a failure of people to resolve the tension between the nature and effects of power2 relations on the one hand, and inalienable rights and dignity of people (and better consideration of the nonhuman world) on the other. Building on Smith’s concept, I  want to stress two facets of brokenness within the human condition:  that centering on psychological disorders of the agent, and that centering on conditions of alienation derived from social structures and power2 relations and how they can interlock. The focus on psychological disorders brings to the fore people’s subjective experience and the myriad problems and paths of self-​brokenness. People experience debilitating neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms. People experience oversocialization and are beholden to big Others and destructive ego ideals. The relational self (to one’s self, others, and world) too often is wracked by unconscious patterns that are toxic and crippling, both to the self and relata. They embrace disempowering self-​narratives and internalize the subjectivity of oppression and low self-​value. People entertain incomplete and false understandings of the world around them. Their identities become predicated on the debasement and marginalization of other peoples (like

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Conclusion 271 “toxic masculinity,” ethnocentrism, racism). They make bad choices, become addicts, seek scapegoats, and disown responsibility for their actions. Through these kinds of disorders, weakness, limitations, spite, and so on, Smith notes that people succumb to and exercise “moral vices and evils…that deflect or frustrate persons from realizing their purpose, which compromise, damage, negate, endanger, deny, or tear down the true nature of peoples’ personhood” (2010, 402). In contrast, the focus on alienation brings to the fore the role of intransitive social institutions and structures that compromise human flourishing on the plane of intrapersonal relations, between the intransitive “self ” and one’s transitive “self-​conception” and wishes and desires. DCR defines alienation as “the condition of ‘being something other…than oneself or [than] what is essential and intrinsic to one’s nature or identity’, of having been—​and being—​‘separated, split, torn, or estranged from oneself’ ” (2007d, 32): [It is a] disjunction…not between a fixed inner real self and one’s actual self, but between what one has become (essentially is and is tending to become) and what one socially is obliged to be or thwarted from becoming. It is separation from anything that is intrinsic to our well-​being, a rift or gash in four-​planar social being. (Ibid., italics mine) Alienation is “a profoundly socio-​historical concept,” and thus “a social condition—​the objectified result of human social activity—​into which the concretely singular person is thrown at birth, such that agents are dominated by social products which they do not experience as their own” (ibid.). Alienation is thus concerned with the negation of humans’ potentiality and their inherent dignity. The focus of the causes of alienation is external constraints and power2 dynamics that have determined the social positioning of subject-​agents, obliging them in some cases (by subordination), thwarting them in others (by oppression). Alienation thus is a symptom of an absence of freedom for self-​direction in the creation and pursuit of projects, the exercise of practices, and the acquisition of newfound deontological powers via sociocultural and occupational forms of agency (or even, perhaps, the creation of new forms of agency). The question, therefore, concerns the potential linkages between various conditions of alienation and the nature, scope, and degree of psychological disturbances. Accordingly, there is no strict differentiation between what are “innate” psychological disorders and those disorders whose etiology is traceable to “extrinsic” sources. The dialectical interplay between psychological disorders, sedimentation, and irrationality on the one hand and social conditions on the other is a highly complex interaction. The psychological sciences are only beginning to understand the brain-​mind-​social relation, centering on the plasticity of the biological brain. Consequently, analytic care must be taken when making claims about “psychological disorders” and

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272 Conclusion causes of “alienation,” because the subject-​agent’s genetic predispositions to certain disorders and other idiosyncrasies interact with social conditions in unpredictable and vaguely understood ways. Nonetheless, the mutual conditioning of agency and social forms (as understood by Bhaskar’s transformational model of social activity/​Archer’s morphostasis-​morphogenesis models of their interaction) suggests there is an analog of the “agent-​social form relation” replicated in human consciousness. Emergent human agential capacities (like the 30 given by Smith) are in causal interplay with human intentionality (in the phenomenological sense of the “aboutness of consciousness”). The constant temporal intransitivity of past intentionalities is a “material causal power” that conditions but does not psychologically (regulatively) determine present and future intentionalities (what is and might be “on the mind”).27 The key mechanism is the degree one’s referential detachment enables the X-​spot “self ” to reflexively deliberate over these past “conditions” through understanding and then accepting, modifying, or rejecting their causal presence. An additional analog with agent-​social form relation rules out a priori accounts of the relation of efficient causality of the self to the material causality of psychological conditions, by the reductionist positions, mutatis mutandis, characterized by “ontological individualism” and “ontological structuralism.” Thus, for certain psychological disorders, like for a head injury or Alzheimer’s disease, referential detachment, and deliberation and potential alteration of the effects, is usually not possible, but there are a large range of disorders that are potentially “transformable.” For the latter disorders, this may mean changing one’s nature; it may also mean, in addition, changing one’s society.

Dialectical critical realism The preceding sections and chapters have brought together a diverse set of social theorists and philosophers to develop a unified social theory that is grounded in the search for transitive understanding and explanation of the emergence our “actual world.” The Subject of Human Being has focused on consciousness, agency, subjectivity, and social forms. These central aspects of human nature derive from causal structures and generative mechanisms found at emergent strata of biological, psychological, and social reality. Through synchronic and diachronic emergence, every moment in geohistory becomes a fixed intransitive totality which provides the conditions of possibility for the next moment. DCR depth ontology—​characterized by natural necessity, the emergent stratification of generative mechanisms/​causal structures, and the foregrounding of absence/​negation in the dialectic of being, be-​going, and becoming in an open system—​is ontological, materialist, and processual. DCR social theory gives a philosophical account of the relationship between subject-​agents and social forms that avoids ontological reductionism to either the individual or social form. The DCR ontology of both agency and social forms recognizes their relatively independent,

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Conclusion 273 non-​reducible causal powers (efficient and material causation). It provides an account of the powers and possibilities of what a human being is, as a subject holding beliefs and desires and an agent with powers of deliberation over their concerns, projects, and practices. It shows that the right to flourish commits one to the rights of all to flourish because the capacities of all persons demand dignity. One of the central tasks of DCR social theory is to research and critique alienating conditions of social power that degrade personal and collective flourishing. The first step is to expose the contradictions between the real world and the world of transitive-​ideological formations that either overcode the operation of generative mechanisms and causal structures or establish particular arrangements of social relations, when the effect is to justify or institute power2 relations. To this end, DCR argues the key to the relationship between transitive errors and intransitive power2 relations has its origin in philosophical accounts of the world that fail (for a variety of reasons) to provide an explicit account of the causal power of absence in connection to being and becoming. The practice and trajectory of “Western” philosophy—​never divorced or disembedded from its sociopolitical context—​has served to reify and protect existing political, economic, and social arrangements of power. Social relations, and their intransitive structures bequeathed from the past, are conceived not as emergent forms dependent on and predicated by concepts and practices of actual agents, but as “naturalized” or “theologized” forms of social relations and institutions. Hence, they hide from view and disavow absence as a possibility in the “natural order” of the world, and thus deny absences of freedom and social conditions of flourishing as non-​possibilities. Without an ontology of absence and negation, the world is regarded in terms of a pure and full “positivity,” such that forms of being can only be regarded as originating in essence, “out of the ground” or “by God’s will.” The condition or situation of things is reified as being-​precisely-​what-​they-​are because of their nature, essence, or spirit. A “positive” essence has determined/​preceded existence, and by this definition, the causal power of absence can play no part in the constitution of things. Philosophy displaces the origin of power to a big Other, which both validates the system of social relations and initiates a conservative interest in their reproduction. Philosophy has thus, despite several radical outliers, imbibed and reflected the outlook and interests of social elites. This social “contamination” of what ought to be a disinterested and unflinching search for “truth,” leading free spirits to the discovery of what is true rather than in effect what sophists want to be thought true, may not be as conspiratorial, duplicitous, or ambitiously naked as it appears. In a more sympathetic understanding of this conservative/​authoritarian tendency, I would suggest that it is a conundrum in the philosophical reckoning of power when enframed by the “positivity” and actualism of ontological monovalence. A flat ontology of social power can only locate its source as a “gift” of an unchanging, eternal, and rightfully

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274 Conclusion true form. The unspoken, disavowed, and/​or unrecognized ground of all human social relations (families, communities, polities, etc.) is that they are fundamentally and ontologically unprincipled in terms of manifest power relations. This void is quickly and seemingly always eliminated by the establishment of authoritarian hierarchies of power2 social relations buttressed by deontological systems and predicated on transitive beliefs deeply infused with error. For DCR, the ontology of power2 relations, the ultimate mechanism responsible for alienation (which then gives rise to forms of subordination and exploitation), is a generative separation which is based on Marx’s materialist reformation of Hegel’s dialectical idealism: [Generative separation is] a primary or original separation or alienation of the immediate producers from their labour, which violates a primary dialectical unity of theory and practice (think of a gardener just gardening) and generates a fivefold alienation of producers from—​ besides (1) their labour and its product—​(2) the means and materials of production, (3) each other, (4) the nexus of social relations within which their production takes place, and (5) ultimately themselves. They are thus alienated at all four planes of their social being or human nature, a condition which underpins the whole gamut of master-​slave relations and their ideological legitimation. (Hartwig 2007e, 219–​20) Alienation is thus a detotalization of the person, constraining self-​direction over one’s body, projects, and practices in the doing, saying, and making of life. It is the fundamental consequence of social conditions structured by power2 relations. As Norrie notes: Bhaskar’s argument is that issues of alienation lie at the core of western philosophy from its inception because it is articulated in the context (different kinds of) structured power relations. Notwithstanding historical difference, however, there remains an underlying unity—​and is Bhaskar’s point—​that ties together the most basic moves in the western philosophical tradition. (2010, 112) The result is various attempts to “short-​circuit” alienation by a philosophical stance: stoicism, skepticism, asceticism, social constructivism, idealism, the ludic play of signifiers in postmodernism, and so forth. DCR argues that these forms of reflexivity (as a stance or attitude) about human existence attempt to escape forms of alienation derived from historically specific and materially grounded social-​structural arrangements (slavery, aristocracy, the capitalist-​wage economy, etc.).

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Conclusion 275 On the one hand, human beings create social and political institutions of deontological powers. On the other, their constitution is contingent and relative to a history of unfolding cultural logics, long-​established pathways, cultural diffusion, and power struggles leading to a very long history of human brokenness. What is repressed is a grasp of the universal natural rights stemming from the emergent capacities of human nature (which establishes a theory-​practice impetus for a recognition and defense of the other’s universal negative rights) and the universal human telos to flourish (which establishes a theory-​practice impetus for a recognition and development of the other’s positive rights). What DCR philosophy achieves is placing “absence” into the heart of ontology, thus placing “alienation” at the center of human nature as defined by the four-​planar model of social being. The issue of power has been the underlying theme of The Subject of Human Being. The efficient power of human agency grounded in one’s capacities interplays with the material causal power of social forms of enablement and constraint. Through collective intentions, human beings create deontological powers by status function Declarations. Generalized master-​ slave power2 relations characterize all forms of institutionalized oppression, exploitation, and subordination throughout the planes of social being. Moreover, power is at the core of governance over human social life in communities, polities, states, etc. Searle writes: “all political power is a matter of status function, and for that reason all political power is deontic power” both in its creation and exercise (2010, 164). Political power is structured by the foundational principles that legitimize and “operationalize” its emergence, the pathways of and mechanisms for selecting who wields power, and the extent of any limitations on its exercise. Furthermore, Searle argues the essence of “political status functions,” what makes political power “powerful” in terms of causality, is its ability to “provide desire-​independent reasons for action” (ibid., 167). Political power is effectively normative and coercive (and for us modern Westerners, in its banality, entails paying taxes and obeying laws). A prime consequence of the deontic powers of political status functions is that their encompassing powers over social life intersect with power2 social relations. The relation may be one of active complicity in support of a power2 dynamic (e.g., slavery as an institution); it might also be one of passive neglect (e.g., entrenched legacies of patriarchy). The point, however, is that deontological powers (for better or for worse) are human creations. They are dependent for their existence on the power1 capacities of human agency, and rightfully subject to transformation when found wanting. Politics is the ultimate governing power over the creation of deontological powers. Consequently, because power2 social relations are ontologically emergent from the activities and concepts of subject-​agents (and not a result of “positive” sources of being), they are fully encompassed (or constellationally embedded) in the political. The material practices, ideological frameworks, normative and coercive powers, relational evils, and deontological constitution of the “subject positions” within power2 structures of relations are all

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276 Conclusion conditional on and accountable to the existing political power arrangements for a given community/​society/​polity.

The final analysis DCR is committed to a revolutionary good that combines individual and collective action seeking the absenting of absences (eliminating needs (and wants), oppression, and exploitation) and an axiology of freedom in service to the “possibility of a planetary society of unity-​in-​diversity in which the free flourishing of each is a condition of the free flourishing of all” (Hartwig 2007f, 157). DCR seeks to retotalize the person and eliminate power2 dynamics by providing a philosophical materialist framework to understand and explain the structures that alienate. The human conatus to flourish provides an ethico-​ political cleaver of judgment to assess and critique both the psychodynamics of self-​defeating, injurious, and irresponsible behaviors (shortcomings of subject-​agency) and the ways in which people become enmeshed in social relations characterized by dehumanization and predation (shortcomings of social forms). This entails that neither individual ethical transformation nor social-​structural and cultural/​ideological transformation can occur without the other. Taken jointly, the DCR/​MacIntyre alliance provides an explicit outline of human nature and a realist account of the human conatus to negate absences in life and pursue internal goods through virtuous activity. It requires one to promote universal flourishing by theory-​practice consistency and to mitigate unintended consequences from relational evils. It necessitates a social reordering to bring social forms in line with the subjectivity of agents, free from a false understanding of atomized egoism torn asunder from the other and nature. Consequently, DCR provides a response to Searle’s critique of positive human rights and the degree and extent of the obligations to others, which all human beings must afford one another. As Searle notes, an ontological-​ existential definition of human nature granting people the right to live, think, speak, move, be silent, have safety, etc., and grounding juridico-​political protection of these rights (as negative liberties), is less problematic than arguments for “positive freedoms.” Rights entail obligations, and the obligation of ourselves to ensure all others have adequate education, housing, employment, medical care, etc., that all people must be free from a lack of these social goods, indeed is a high bar to reach. It could overload personal responsibility for others and weaken the energies we invest into, and the “selfish affinity” we have for, our circle of family, friends, and community. The moral force of a commitment to the flourishing of all appears much weaker than a commitment to the well-​being of one’s immediate circle of friends and family, and still weaker than the same commitment to one’s tribe, nation, group, etc., because it feels more abstract and unintimate. However, in response to Searle’s claim that there is no strong argument for inalienable positive rights that can obligate other people to provide social

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Conclusion 277 goods, his implicit need for an understanding of virtue ethics opens the door for such a claim, at least a claim that one is required by consistency to work toward the elimination of the myriad constraints and absences in the flourishing of others. Despite being relatively “trapped” in our contingent circumstances, highly conditioned by the context of our natality, the expansion of our “in-​group” to include all members of the human race is grounded in identifying what is universally true as having ontological priority over what is contingently true. If truth is the telos of philosophical practice, freedom and flourishing the telos of human being, then justice is the telos of society. A commitment to the flourishing of all is a call to direct our concerns and projects in ways that, perhaps in their small and immediate effects, within our own communities and polities, promote the larger “cause” of human flourishing. At the same time, it calls attention to institutions and structures through which our causal responsibility for relational evils is generated and/​ or sustained, often at great distance or having effects in the future. In Smith’ view, the “teleological, virtues-​based, personalist approach to morality…does not lend itself to…rules and instructions” or “specific obligations” (2010, 409). It is rather a “general orientation” that “prudent and just persons will in general accept and work with their personal finitude and limitation—​ mental, emotional, bodily, financial, and so on—​as they go about seeking the good of others” (ibid.). One’s “flourishing of human personhood…require[s]‌ extending oneself to others beyond one’s natural in-​groups, reaching out to strangers, the needy, even sometimes offenders and enemies…[in] a concurrent movement outward in wider and wider concentric circles of relation and association” (ibid.). Smith reminds us that social theory must consider persons as conscious centers of experience and having dignity, and these essentials are emergent features of people and implicated in any discussion about the social world. DCR social theory, and its emphasis on the relatively independent causal powers of agency and social forms, directs research and understanding to their interplay, with an appreciation of their unique properties, capacities, and effects. DCR-​informed social science, and its search for causal structures and generative mechanisms, explains and explicates the practices and meanings of social, cultural, political, and economic institutions and structures that constitute their forms and structures. Critical social science—​by its practice and force—​therefore eschews strong cultural relativism and its philosophical inability to make cross-​cultural/​historical critiques because its onto-​ethical framework identifies social forms that fail to uphold the dignity of all people and their conatus to flourish. A critical social science also displaces competing and inadequate theories that remain caught in the false dichotomy between ontological individualism and ontological structuralism, as well as folk ideologies and “common sense” explanations that provide ideological cover for structural domination. The social science “project” thus has inherent normative dimensions that judge other social-​theoretical claims and social institutions, structures, and

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278 Conclusion cultural systems that fail to produce social goods and/​or respect human dignity and conatus to flourish. Nonetheless, to address the “brokenness” in the world, a deeper philosophical account of subject-​agency must include a forthright evaluation and discussion of personal failings, vices, and blind spots of subjects-​agents qua real people struggling to flourish despite these internal obstacles. Psychoanalytic theory and case study, multidisciplinary research into cognitive bias, biography, literature, and participant observation/​ethnography are potential resources to explore the gamut of cultural “patterns of thought,” ideological modes of enframing the world, psychodynamics of subconscious bias and sedimented values, and defects in cognitive skills. For it is through social structures that the subjectivities of zero-​sum gamesmanship are created, as well as the ability to enhance and exercise power with impunity to the detriment of human and nonhuman others. This is not to say that life could become completely fair, conflicts eliminated, and all suffering abated. It is to say that the parameters of conduct, actions, and acceptable projects can be negotiated and organized in a way that universally enshrines shared rights and obligations that are imbricated within all people’s development of concerns, projects, and practices. The inevitable unfairnesses, conflicts, and suffering that all people experience would thus be experienced in a different light, not of injustice, nihilism, cynicism, or hopelessness, but rather with a philosophical detachment born from an understanding of how we participate individually in the grand human telos, though always in imperfect, unrealized, and frequently self-​defeating ways. Somebody always is smarter, finer-​looking, and has a home with a view to die for. The contingencies of fortune and misfortune, sickness, physical decline, and death are ineluctable parameters of being alive. People trundle through life with great joys and great sorrows. What more can be said? That is our condition, and it has dignity.

Notes 1 As the example of abortion attests, and fights over contraception equally evoke, vehement (and sometimes violent) social antagonism can arise over the value of a putative human right. It would seem to follow that “pro-​choice” and “pro-​ life” advocates hold different conceptions of human nature (especially “women’s nature”) and propose different views on the deontological status of a “fetus” in comparison to the status of a “human being.” It appears to me the point where “life begins” and deontological powers are granted to a fetus, turning it into a “human being” and “citizen,” is arbitrary and without a clear (de)ontological determining point. If this is the case, then the determining point is from “culture,” and informed by external values (e.g., a woman’s right to control her body) and practical considerations (e.g., the health of the mother and child). Consequently, in radically pluralistic societies, where different conceptions of human nature coexist, we find bitter political struggle over these lines. 2 Note that a deontology of rights attached to or stemming from a brute “biological fact” of human existence undermines the infamous and reified “nature-​culture”

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Conclusion 279 dichotomy. Perforce, so does the fact that human agency, grounded in the structure of consciousness, manifests through sociocultural and occupational modes of agency. Human nature is profoundly enmeshed in “culture,” while simultaneously, only by enculturation and through received social forms are the capacities and powers of our nature actualized. 3 Up to this point, I  have employed the term “practice” in a fairly loose way (of doing, saying, and making). As I  explain below, “practice” in relation to virtue ethics is going to take on a much more specific sense. Until then, the key point is that virtues are intimately bound with practices. 4 My reference to Alasdair MacIntyre and his influential account of virtue ethics presupposes Christian Smith’s theory of “critical realist personalism,” which I discuss below. Smith draws from MacIntyre’s work After Virtue to support his understanding of virtue ethics. I read After Virtue initially as an undergraduate studying philosophy, and it has been a foundational text in my thinking. Reading Smith, whose book What is a Person? has considerable overlap of themes and intents with The Subject of Human Being, I came to a greater understanding of the importance of Aristotelian virtue ethics within the DCR view on human nature and the contribution MacIntyre provides to DCR philosophy. Here, I want to recognize Smith’s contribution to my thinking about human nature, ethics, and teleology. At the same time, because the logical sequencing of ideas in this chapter demanded I discuss virtue ethics before “personalism,” I am drawing from MacIntyre (for the moment) as a separate “source of conceptions” without a formal reference to Smith’s work. 5 Aristotle’s reference to a “divinity” in this sentence could be a cause for concern. Aristotle ultimately had to posit a God (nous) as an “eternal thinker of the world” as the only possible explanation (in his understanding) for the “cause” of immanent forms in the world (as opposed to Plato’s distinct “realm of ideal forms”). However, in essentials both perform the same ontological task. The problem is that both Plato and Aristotle did not have a concept of natural necessity and thereby an ontology grounded in generative mechanisms and causal structures which account for the “actual world.” It is understandable that many philosophers suppose there must be an “intent” behind reality, of what makes reality as it is. This is the case for two reasons: it is made either from an a priori belief in a universal God, or from a faulty understanding of the nature of reality without consideration of the alethic truth of being and the natural necessity of its “as is,” which then necessitates logically (a posteriori) that some kind of “higher power” is responsible. Aristotle, while trying to get around the untenable position of Platonic forms, could only reproduce an idealist ontology slightly “closer to the ground.” There is more to say on this matter—​especially the philosophical precursors to Plato and Aristotle’s common error—​and (once again) I  recommend turning to Alan Norrie’s book Dialectic and Difference (2010, 158–​78) for an excellent summary of Roy Bhaskar’s original analysis of this problem in Plato Etc. (1994) and Dialectic:  The Pulse of Freedom (2008). The more immediate point is that Aristotle’s reliance on nous can be replaced with an understanding of human nature fully in line with the DCR supposition of the natural necessity of human being, as an ontology of human nature that is immanent, materialist, and real. Aristotle correctly identified and explicated the human telos and the ethic of virtue because they are emergent features of human nature. He only failed to understand the actual “emergence basis” of

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280 Conclusion these features. It should also be noted that MacIntyre too jettisons any ontological reliance on God in his contemporary version of virtue ethics. 6 In contrast are various “external goods” the practice may reward (MacIntyre 1984, 190). These are “objects of competition in which there are losers as well as winners” and which “when achieved…are always some individual’s property and possession,” such as “prestige, status, and money” (ibid.). The definitive property of an external good is that it is “contingently attached” to the practice, and in effect has a tendency to instrumentalize the practice in other terms—​“show me the money!” In MacIntyre’s example of chess, he imagines a child whose primary motivation to play and triumph is an offer of 50 cents—​the money in this case (and perhaps in all cases) is an external good. The game of chess also holds out many possibilities for achieving internal goods to the game: “the achievement of a certain highly particular kind of analytical skill, strategic imagination, and competitive intensity” (ibid., 188). 7 Ego ideals, dictates of the big Other, and all other forms of collective representations of what it means to be complete, fulfilled, self-​actualized, self-​realized, successfully “self-​helped,” etc., I would surmise, are reified “answers” to the question of what it means to be a “flourishing human,” and in our culture available from Amazon Prime in two days. 8 Just to be fair, it is possible to tease out how a person could be neurotically enthralled to their own telos to flourish or to others’ flourishing. A  person might practice “hyper-​self-​improvement schemes” to a point where it becomes self-​defeating by sleep deprivation or a “joyless death march” by grinding determination. Likewise, somebody might commit themselves to promote universal flourishing through social activism to a point their intimate relations and/​or sense of self deteriorates. 9 Even the medieval Bogomil movement, one of the most (literally) anti-​human, de-​ worldly religious groups I know of, who saw existence as intransigently evil because Satan created all matter and form outside the soul, and who advised forswearing sex and children to end human existence and return to a purely spiritual existence, had a “positive vision” in their beliefs to attain immortal afterlife—​viz., to flourish. 10 Searle notes that there are “informal social obligations,” such as an obligation to invite a friend to one’s party, but the friend does not have a “right” to be invited (2010, 178). 11 This is a highly truncated and admittedly insufficient explanation of how teleological considerations were eliminated in Western thought in the early modern era. The more important point is that they were, and in MacIntyre’s estimation, this explains “why the enlightenment project had to fail” (1984, 51–​61). 12 As noted in chapter seven, Searle too explicitly argues against understanding of being in terms of its “functionality,” a point I attempt to critique (see 233n13). Searle argues, as in his example of a “beating heart,” any claim of “functionality” is not intrinsic but is an “human-​made” interpretation bestowed upon it. It appears to me this is a dogmatic rejection of teleological analysis borne from Searle’s positivist presumptions. At the same time, my argument for the role of virtue ethics in Searle’s defense of human rights would override his rejection of functionality, at least in terms of human nature. 13 Hereinafter, I  will conflate “projects and practices” as the singular concept of “practice.” The project to “become better at chess” only materializes in the “practices” of reading and thinking about and playing chess, for example. Each practice has potential virtues to be exercised and internal goods to be achieved.

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Conclusion 281 To this end, the larger “project” sets in motion specific practices, whose internal goods fulfill the project goal by generalizing their attributes in terms of enhanced “functioning”: in this case, being a “better chess player.” 14 For example, if a 16 year-​old and a 90 year-​old side-​by-​side need a liver transplant, it is not ethically problematic to suggest the 16 year-​old should have priority. It is routine that “extra-​ethical” pragmatic/​logistical/​statistical considerations determine a proper course of action. 15 This latter point is drawn from David Harvey’s cogent The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1990). 16 In many ways, MacIntyre’s restricted meaning of “practice” overlaps with the classical definition of poiesis, i.e. “creation (making), an activity which results in a product, characteristic of crafts” (Hartwig 2007c, 22). In classical terms, praxis referred to “action undertaken for its own sake (doing) (ibid.). Bhaskar, following Marx, employs praxis as a “wider concept, constellationally embracing all the different kinds of poiesis (aligned with creative work, labour, production) in addition to other forms of distinctly human activity or practice” (ibid., italics Hartwig’s). Hence my argument that DCR teleology of praxis includes (constellationally) MacIntyre’s concept of practice. 17 The term “desiring-​machine” is a concept from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s seminal (but flawed) Anti-​Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983). 18 And of course, within the master-​slave dyad, the internal relation is also a one-​ sided dependency:  masters need slaves to have power as a master; slaves, conversely, have no need for a master, because, “most assumingly,” they have no desire for such self-​disempowerment. 19 Though incidental to the main argument of this paragraph, social-​structural positions are not sufficient for human agency because language and Cultural System predicates (beliefs, values, etc.) are also necessary. 20 Smith notes that “love is not a term commonly referenced in sociology” but that such a concept is “unavoidable for talking about personhood” because it identifies that for “positive” human relations (my scare quotes) there is always an affectional bond (2010, 73). Smith notes further the Greeks identified different types of affectional bonds, which the singular term “love” struggles to convey. Love for the other can manifest the affections of eros (romantic), phileo (friendship/​ enjoyment), storge (familial/​ community), and agape (unconditional/​altruistic). “Relational subjects” are defined in important ways by their bonds with others in accordance with the appropriate type of “love” of the other. As a practice, creating and maintaining a bond entails there is an ethics of conduct dictating the terms by which the bond flourishes (or at least stumbles along). 21 Contradictions arise in the small and large of life. For example, an obligation in one’s job can undermine one’s responsibilities as a parent; German-​Americans suppressed their identity and language in the heat of World War I, fearful of suspicion and persecution; the ubiquitous problem of employment discrimination based on sociocultural background (gender, race, etc.); the tension between developing new friendships and maintaining old ones; etc. 22 Much, much more could be said about Smith’s list of 30 capacities, and I  recommend his explication of their unique powers in relation to their totality as a causal structure of human being (and becoming). I have only considered a subset of the full list, ones that are essential for the overall analysis presented in this book, pertaining to the ontologies of consciousness, agency, subjectivity, and

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282 Conclusion social forms. My analysis, however, certainly entails or draws implicitly on Smith’s more complete set, such as number 14, “inventing and employing technology,” and number 29, “aesthetic judgement and enjoyment” (2010, 54). 23 For example, with a larger caste hierarchy, a “lower-​caste family” may have a relation of a “master” husband and subordinate wife and daughters, replicating power2 relations in different institutional domains with different consequences. 24 Donati and Archer use the term “modus vivendi” to suggest that in the process of maturation and “socialization” subject-​agents must find their way of life by defining their “ultimate concerns” (core values, fundamental beliefs, life-​purpose, etc.), a process by which “we,” as subject-​agents, “delineat[e]‌…those subjects and objects in the world with whom and with which we willingly become engaged, and when we do so also represents the final phase of dedication” (2015, 133, italics Donati and Archer’s). 25 The caveat here, as Goffman notes, is that the respect and recognition of another’s personhood is dependent on the fact the individual is being sincere and actually possesses the characteristics they claim for themselves and is not a con artist, confidence trickster, or imposter for some nefarious end. 26 I use the word “gift” here to suggest that our recognition of another’s dignity has an element of choice to it (to give or not to give), as does an active and steadfast “commitment to reality and truth,” to act in accordance with the “facts” as they are. Recognition as an “epistemic act” is transitive and thus prone to error, ideological manipulation, and willful self-​deceit. Transcending self-​interest and ideology in the interest of truth and reality by recognizing the dignity of the other obligates one to equalize the power dynamics inherent to many social interactions/​ relations as much as possible, and this is a primordial “gift-​exchange” underlying all forms of non-​pathological human intercourse. I  was reminded of Marcel Mauss’ theory of “the gift” by Smith (2010, 407) and the importance of gift-​giving in the creation and maintenance of social relations. 27 This is obviously much less true for intentionalities derived from the five senses. The objective/​ external causes of what one sees, hears, smells, etc. are in an important sense “not optional” and are determinative in situ of one’s sensory experiences. The issue of psychological determinism concerns more “existentially” significant kinds of intentionalities: the causal power of “prior” beliefs, desires, decisions, addictions, emotional states, etc. on present states and actions. Also, however uninteresting, one can shut one’s eyes and plug one’s nose, thus removing these “intentionalities” from consciousness.

Bibliography Bhaskar, Roy. 2008. Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. New York: Routledge. Bhaskar, Roy. 2010. Plato, Etc.:  Philosophical Problems and Their Resolution. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1983. Anti-​Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Donati, Pierpaolo, and Margaret S. Archer. 2015. The Relational Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, Irving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.

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Conclusion 283 Hartwig, Mervyn. 2007a. “Universalisability.” In Dictionary of Critical Realism. Edited by Mervyn Hartwig. New York: Routledge. Hartwig, Mervyn. 2007b. “Human Nature.” In Dictionary of Critical Realism. Edited by Mervyn Hartwig. New York: Routledge. Hartwig, Mervyn. 2007c. “Agency.” In Dictionary of Critical Realism. Edited by Mervyn Hartwig. New York: Routledge. Hartwig, Mervyn. 2007d. “Alienation.” In Dictionary of Critical Realism. Edited by Mervyn Hartwig. New York: Routledge. Hartwig, Mervyn. 2007e. “Generative Separation.” In Dictionary of Critical Realism. Edited by Mervyn Hartwig. New York: Routledge. Hartwig, Mervyn. 2007f. “Emancipatory Axiology.” In Dictionary of Critical Realism. Edited by Mervyn Hartwig. New York: Routledge. Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After Virtue:  A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Morgan, Jamie. 2007. “Power.” In Dictionary of Critical Realism. Edited by Mervyn Hartwig. New York: Routledge. Norrie, Alan. 2010. Dialectic and Difference:  Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds for Justice. New York: Routledge. Searle, John R. 2010. Making the Social World. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Christian. 2010. What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sue, Derald Wing. 2010. Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

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Index

agency: and Aristotelian typology of causation 169, 175; as causality 66; as efficient cause 169; and freedom 122, 157; and human body 166n1; as human causal power 3, 7, 93, 105–​106, 114, 120, 121, 135, 144, 152, 167, 259; and human telos 269; in Lacanian psychoanalytical theory 144, 152, 153–​54; and social forms 115; and structure of consciousness 78; see also reflexive deliberation; Archer: tripartite character of agency agent-​structure problem 6–​8, 66, 167–​76, 178, 226; agents and structures 126, 134; and dialectical critical realism 168; and language 200, 219; and ontological elisionism 168, 170, 171–​75; and ontological individualism 168, 170, 272, 277; and ontological structuralism 168, 170–​71, 218, 272, 277 alienation 65, 270–​72, 274–​75 Archer, Margaret 4, 8, 105; concerns, projects, and practices 8, 79, 109–​13, 117, 119, 120, 168, 245, 249, 255; critique of Searle [with Donati] 208–​13; Cultural System 178–​79; enablements and constraints 9, 25, 44, 50, 52, 111, 112, 114–​15, 117–​18, 120, 121, 125, 127, 128, 159, 167, 169, 170–​72, 176, 192, 205, 211, 229, 244, 245, 263, 275; morphogenesis 111, 112, 117, 185, 213, 254; morphostasis 112, 117, 185, 213; ontological conflationism 12n, 126, 133, 248 see also agent-​structure problem: ontological elisionism; relational goods (and evils) [with Donati] 8, 180–​82, 209, 212, 266–​68; relational

realism [with Donati] 180–​83, 267; three orders of natural reality 115, 118–​19; tripartite character of agency 121–​26, 160, 166, 167, 175–​76, 179–​80, 182, 224, 245, 252; unacknowledged conditions 127–​30, 132, 158; vested interests 130–​32; warranted first-​ person authority 109, 113–​14, 121; see also reflexive deliberation Aristotle 60, 175, 200, 242n5, 253; see also agency: Aristotelian typology of causation; virtue ethics Baudrillard, Jean 18 belief 2, 3, 10, 96, 107–​108, 122, 127, 151; in Searle’s theory of intentionality 202, 203, 205, 222n17, 228; and the subconscious 145–​47, 154 Benjamin, Walter 39n16 Berkeley, Bishop 6n4, 60 Bhaskar, Roy 4, 9, 10; and intentionality 157n20; and metaReality 16; and philosophy 16; positioned-​practice-​ places 122, 175; transformational model of social activity 185, 254, 272; see also dialectical critical realism Bourdieu, Pierre 112n10, 133, 171, 173, 200, 200n4 Cartesianism 60, 79, 107–​108, 126; and the ego 144, 155 causal criterion of reality 5, 6, 15, 20, 23, 28, 31, 35, 41, 47, 51, 62, 64, 66, 78, 146n4, 183, 194; and emergence 31, 41 causal mechanism(s) 16, 17, 22, 26–​28, 56, 66, 129, 176, 181, 195, 225, 229, 260, 273, 279; and agency 68, 111, 167; and alienation 273–​74; of biology 39; and causal structures 50n25;

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Index 285 and change 42, 55, 57, 59, 60–​62, 98; and consciousness 78–​79, 96–​97, 146, 200, 204, 272; as criterion for realty 20–​21, 160; as explanations 54; and dehumanization 264–​65; and democracy 240; as desire 149; of exchange 67; and the nation-​state 230; and ontological emergence 15, 18, 251, 255, 272; and physical and social sciences 5–​6, 23–​24, 34–​37, 41, 44–​45, 48, 277; of political power 275; and reflexive deliberation/​reflexivity 3, 69, 106, 120–​21, 132, 185; and relational subjects 211; of socialization/​ enculturation 9, 92, 113, 145–​47, 152; as status function Declarations 8, 192–​93, 197, 199, 209, 213–​15, 228, 237; and subconsciousness 154; theory of 49–​54; and virtue ethics 243; of wealth distribution 216 causal powers 5, 10, 12n, 15, 21–​25, 27–​28, 37, 51, 53, 61, 66–​69, 106, 134, 157n19, 182, 255, 261, 262; and absence 5, 62; and agents and structures 7–​8, 114, 116, 145n2, 167; and consciousness 81, 105, 200n4; discovery of 160; as efficient and material causation 169–​76, 212, 259, 273; and emergence 31, 34, 35, 41, 42–​49, 111, 121, 155n13, 177, 191; of enablements and constraints 9, 117, 121, 167–​68, 226; of human existence 128; and Lacanian psychoanalysis 146n4, 153; and mechanisms 51, 62, 199; and ontological collapse 193; and science 16; and social forms 114–​15, 120, 167, 183, 185, 200n4, 211, 277; of social positions 125; and social world 18; and the subconscious 151; see also agency causal powers materialism 68, 110, 159, 213, 231 causal structures see causal mechanism concrete universals 66, 115n11, 115n13, 124, 252–​57; see also dialectical critical realism: four planes of social being consciousness 2, 4, 5n3, 16, 43, 44, 55, 58, 105, 122, 133, 134, 167n3, 191n3, 194, 213, 218, 220, 238, 241n2, 248, 254, 262, 272; as capacity 37, 42, 50, 115, 257, 263n22; and dualism 29–​30; and emergence 15, 31, 38–​40, 40n17, 42, 68, 109; as defining homo sapiens/​

human beings 69, 261, 263; as false 269; as God 61; and human agency 69, 259; irony of 14; as intransitive object 23; and mechanisms 54n26, 54; and neo-​Kantianism 128; ontological status of 66, 78–​99; phenomenal experience of 108; and projects 120; and psychoanalysis 146n5, 146, 151, 155n13, 158, 159, 160, 184; reductionist models of 45n23, 62, 105n2, 218; and social contradictions 56; and social ontology 6–​7; temporality of 106; see also John Searle: general structure of intentionality; prelinguistic consciousness/​intentionality DCR see dialectical critical realism deontic powers see deontology deontology: as power 8, 106, 125, 246; in Searle’s social ontology 192, 196–​97, 199, 214, 216, 217, 223, 224, 226, 227, 228, 229–​30, 237, 241, 247; and universal rights 239; and virtue ethics 245–​46 Deleuze, Gilles 61n29 Derrida, Jacques 6, 18, 61n29 Descartes, René 108n5, 155n13, 157; see also Cartesianism desire 2, 3, 10, 107–​108, 110, 122, 127, 259; as drive 154; in Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory 145–​47, 148n7, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154; in Sartre’s phenomenology of consciousness 93, 96, 97–​99, 205; in Searle’s theory of intentionality 202, 211, 222n17, 228, 229–​30 determinism: agents and structures 96, 114; cultural 7; economic 173; epistemic and ontological 33; future 155; and materialism 67n34, 68; mechanistic 61; ontological versus epistemic 32–​33; and prediction 31; psychological determinism 255, 272n27; social 127; structural 11; as a thought trend 238; ubiquity and regulative determinism 33–​37, 255 dialectical critical realism 4–​6, 7, 9, 11, 14–​16, 272–​78; absence/​negation 6, 14, 34, 39, 42, 55–​63, 64, 65, 68, 91, 92, 93, 96–​98, 110, 112, 117, 169, 258–​59, 260, 263, 271, 272–​75, 276–​77; alethic truth 17n3, 242n5, 257; axiology of freedom 276; depth

286

286 Index ontology 22, 26, 62, 123, 172, 212, 250; epistemic fallacy 4, 16, 18, 56, 84n6, 250; and ethics 10, 63, 65, 136, 266; fallibilism 18, 35, 143, 238; and flux 55, 59–​62; four planes of social being 9, 66, 105, 115n11, 124, 254–​55, 263, 266; fourfold polysemy of being 57; generalized master-​slave relations (power2 relations) 261, 265–​66, 268, 270–​71, 273–​75, 276; “holy trinity” 19–​20; immanent latent teleology of praxis 258; intransitive domain of reality 5, 16n2, 16–​18, 53, 56, 205, 240; and knowledge production 18, 24; natural necessity 20, 22, 25, 44, 56, 57, 60, 61, 64, 66, 242n5; non-​identity 31, 56, 58–​59, 64; ontic fallacy 108n5; ontological stratification 23–​24, 28, 60, 128, 194; ontological turn 19, 21; pulse of freedom 63, 117; referential detachment 14, 21, 248, 255, 259, 272; and social theory 9, 105n1, 106n3, 110, 114, 134, 137–​38, 168, 193, 201, 254, 272–​73, 277; and terminology 11; theory-​practice (in)consistency 63, 183, 256, 257, 266, 269–​70, 275, 276; TINA formations 174; transitive domain of knowledge 5, 16–​18, 53, 240 dualism 29–​31, 39, 40n17, 42, 54n26, 60, 67n34, 81n4, 89; and emergence 15; and mind-​body 67n34, 78, 79–​82, 87, 105, 155n13, 157 Durkheim, Émile 18, 156, 200 eliminative materialism 5, 15, 29, 37, 80–​85, 89, 106, 155n13; as ontological principle 31; see also reductionism eliminative reductionism see eliminative materialism emergence 5, 21, 23n7, 27, 155n13, 176; and Aristotle 242n5; and causality 41–​49, 62, 80, 134, 212; and change 55, 57, 65; and consciousness 31, 42; diachronic (historical) emergence 25, 28, 31, 38–​42, 49, 64, 65n32, 272; emergence basis and emergents 28–​30, 38–​39, 41, 48, 49, 123, 200, 213; emergent powers materialism 5, 15, 33, 193, 213, 229, 246, 250; and ethical agency 266; and human telos 245; inextricability of diachronic and synchronic emergence 40–​41, 59; of institutions/​social forms 173, 183,

193, 215, 219; of internal goods 242, 254; of language 220; of the person 263; and philosophical ontology 42, 44, 69, 90; of political power 275; of relational evils 268; of the self 78; of social commitment 223; and structural reproduction 168; synchronic (constitutive) emergence 25, 28, 31, 38–​42, 44, 46, 49, 51, 57, 61, 64, 272; synchronic and diachronic processes 59; theory of 28–​42, 50; and unified social theory 272 empiricism 4, 6, 18, 20, 22, 62, 133, 192, 251; and consciousness 205; and epistemology 19, 35, 84n6; and morality 251; and ontological assumptions 37, 61, 168 existential psychoanalysis 9, 144, 154–​59 Foucault, Michael 6, 18, 200, 200n4 Freud, Sigmund 146, 147n6, 204n6 Freudian psychoanalytical theory 154, 155 generative mechanisms see causal mechanisms Giddens, Anthony 171n7, 171, 173 Habermas, Jürgen 200 Hegel, Georg W.F. 6n4, 55–​56; 64, 177, 274 Heidegger, Martin 6, 220; and Dasein 105n2, 128–​29, 155n13, 184 Heraclitus 55, 61n29 human agency see agency human being(s) 1–​2, 3, 95, 96, 116, 135–​36, 156–​57, 160, 166, 216, 230n22, 237–​38, 246, 251, 260; flourishing 241, 247; and freedom 239; in geohistorical context 7, 155n14, 184n19, 267; and language 218, 223; nature versus nurture 156n18, 241n2; and process 47, 156n17; and social being 67, 122; and social ontology 193; as subject and agent 273; universal features 263; as untutored 243, 250; and value 10 see also; virtue ethics human capacities 10, 54n26, 174, 248–​49, 262; and culture 241n2; and ethics 255, 257, 259, 262; and personhood 263, 269 human nature 10, 54n26, 63, 96, 238, 239, 241, 248, 249, 256–​61, 272; and the Enlightenment 157

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Index 287 human rights 101, 267; and MacIntyre critique of 247–​49, 252; see also John Searle: human rights Hume, David 6n4, 4, 107, 108n5; and causal relations 82; and conception of the self 88; and constant conjunctions 34, 61, 132, 134; and ethics 250–​52 Husserl, Edmund: 78, 96n27; internal time consciousness 79, 89–​91, 93; see also self, the idealism 6n4, 15, 18, 19, 22, 23, 42, 60; and Aristotle 242n5; as conceptual block 57; and dialectical critical realism 62, 68; and epistemic fallacy 61; and Hegel’s dialectic 55–​56, 274; and Heidegger 128; and Lacan 144; and language 220; New Age 137; and ontological conflationism 7n5; and Searle 237; and social constructionism 106, 136, 144, 254; and the Sokal hoax 5n3 Kant, Immanuel 4, 18, 60, 86n11, 108n5; and morality 250–​54 Kierkegaard, Søren 250 Lacan, Jacques 107, 144–​54; the big Other 6, 127n20, 144, 146, 148, 151, 153, 157, 158, 160, 171, 184, 229, 245; fundamental fantasy 110n6, 148, 149–​50, 151, 154, 158–​59, 160; jouissance 148–​49, 151; and language 218, 220, 222n17; and neurosis 146–​51, 154; objet petit a 127n20, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153, 171; the Real 146, 148, 150, 159; and the subconscious 9, 144–​54; the subject as drive 148; the subject supposed to know 148; see also desire; subconscious, the Lacanian psychoanalysis see Jacques Lacan MacIntyre, Alasdair see human rights; virtue ethics Marx, Karl 56, 68, 274 May, Rollo 155n14, 157–​58, 160 mechanism see causal mechanisms Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice  6 Nietzsche, Friedrich 6, 17n3 Nietzschean critical philosophy 151n8

ontological actualism 34, 62, 172, 174, 211, 250, 273 ontological monovalence 55, 58, 60, 273 ontological realism 4–​5, 15, 19, 60 other, the 124, 265 Parmenides 55, 59, 60 person, the 123, 261–​66 philosophical anthropology 3, 31, 63, 99, 155n14, 159, 194, 258, 261–​62; and language 201 philosophical idealism see idealism philosophical materialism 14–​77, 213; epistemological materialism 14, 16–​18; ontological materialism 14, 19–​66, 183; practical materialism 14, 66–​68, 79 philosophical ontology 14–​18, 20–​21, 24n8, 28, 32, 42, 54, 60, 62, 64 philosophy: emotivism 251, 252, 253; and philosophical problems 1, project of 4–​5, 10, 14; and Western tradition 15, 16, 18, 55, 59–​60, 194, 249, 253, 273–​74 philosophy of mind 15, 80n2, 83, 86n8; see also John Searle philosophy of society see John Searle Plato 6n4, 55, 59, 60, 242n5, 253 postmodernism 4, 5n3, 16, 18, 27, 60, 84n6, 155n14, 168, 274 poststructuralism 5n3, 7, 23, 60, 61n29, 136n26, 144, 155n13 psychoanalysis: theory of 9, 112–​13, 137–​38; clinical value of 9, 146, 158–​59; practice of 108–​109 reality principle 10, 17n3, 19, 63, 205 reasons for action 2–​3, 15, 88–​89, 108, 133, 217, 249; see also John Searle: desire-​dependent reasons for action; desire-​independent reasons for action reasons as causal 133, 255 reductionism 1, 5, 27, 43, 78, 80–​84, 89, 99, 105, 153, 231, 248; and change 58–​59; of consciousness to the brain 40n17, 62; of consciousness to language 218; and emergence 28–​38, 39, 41n20, 42–​48; and ethics 257; and genetics 15; and models of subjectivity 133–​34; and social ontology 7n5, 7, 10, 122, 169–​76, 272; sociological 131, 156–​57 reflexive deliberation 8, 12n, 57, 68, 79, 91, 99, 105–​106, 109, 112–​16,

288

288 Index 119, 122, 132n24, 160, 157n20, 167, 195n3, 255; and discursive penetration 127; and human telos 244; as mechanism 120–​21, 167n3, 272; as mediatory capacity 106n3; in social relations 180–​81 reflexivity see reflexive deliberation Sartre, John-​Paul 78, 92–​99, 106n3; being-​for-​itself 95, 96, 98; and dialectical critical realism 98–​99; mauvaise foi/​self-​deception 93, 96, 99, 135, 147, 159, 160; non-​positional consciousness 79, 92, 94–​95, 96, 97; nothingness and freedom 93, 97; and problem of ontological monovalence 98; see also desire; self, the Saussure, Ferdinand de 152, 154, 220, 222 Searle, John 5n3, 8; the Background 208, 211; biological naturalism 82–​83, 200, 238; collective intentionality/​ intentions 8, 194–​97, 199, 205–​211, 216, 218, 219, 222, 224, 226, 227, 231, 231n24; and consciousness 78–​89, 96n27; conditions of satisfaction 204–​205, 224; constitutive rules 197–​98, 206, 216; critique of Heidegger 128, 184n19; desire-​ dependent reasons for action 211, 229–​30, 244, 245; desire-​independent reasons for action 192, 211, 215, 228–​29, 244, 245; and dialectical critical realism 192; first-​person ontology 79, 84–​86, 93, 105, 107, 200; freedom of will 88; general structure of intentionality 201–​205; human rights 54n26, 237–​41, 245, 247; institutional facts 194, 195, 199–​201, 213, 215–​17, 225–​29, 231; institutional reality 192, 194, 197–​201, 206, 212–​19, 221–​27; institutions 191–​95, 197–​201, 206, 207, 212, 213, 215–​17, 218, 219, 224, 225, 227, 228–​31, 260; language 192, 193, 198, 200–​201, 218–​23; other minds 86n10; political power 275; prelinguistic consciousness/​ intentionality 193, 198, 200, 200n4, 201, 203, 204, 213, 218, 220, 221, 223, 226; regulative rules 197; simultaneous causality 8; social contract theory 200–​201; and social science 227–​28; speech acts 198, 200, 203, 204, 212–​14, 219–​25, 240, 241, 248, 257; status function Declarations 192, 198–​201,

209, 212–​19, 221, 224, 226–​28, 231, 240, 246, 247, 249; unified conscious field 79, 85–​89, 193, 203, 220; word/​ mind-​to-​world direction of fit 198, 202, 204, 214 see also belief; world-​ to-​word/​mind direction of fit 198, 202–​203, 204, 214, 259 see also desire; see also deontology; self, the self, the 2, 3, 78, 124, 145, 180, 262; as false idol 154; and fundamental fantasy 149; in Husserl’s phenomenology of consciousness 90, 91–​92; in Sartre’s phenomenology of consciousness 93, 94–​98; in Searle’s philosophy of mind 87–​89, 135; and subjectivity 105 Simmel, Georg 200 Smith, Christian: brokenness 270–​72; dignity 237, 268–​70, 277–​78; love 262n20; personalism 242n4, 262; see also human capacities; person, the social constructionism 7, 16, 19, 84, 105n2, 136n26, 148, 254, 274 social forms 5, 122, 166, 167, 169, 184, 191n1, 200n4, 205, 216, 226, 229; and human agency 115; as structure 6; see also agent-​structure problem social ontology 6–​9, 191–​235, 237, 246 social science 227, 277 social structure 6, 7, 125, 176–​79, 182, 226 sociological destiny 9, 110 subconscious, the 9, 79; in Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory 144–​54 subject, the: and agency 78n1; ontological basis 8; as relational subject 180–​81, 183, 209, 211–​12, 266; as self 2 subjective idealism see idealism subjectivity 4, 8, 67n33, 78n1, 79, 96n27, 99, 105–​43, 166, 180, 249, 257; and brain damage 81n3; in Lacanian psychoanalytical theory 151–​53, 218; of oppression 270; see also beliefs; desires temporality 14, 50, 54–​55, 65, 68, 169, 255; and agents and structures 8, 106n3, 183–​85, 230, 259; and causality 61; and consciousness 2, 78, 82, 88–​93, 97, 99, 105, 106, 115, 135, 156, 195n3, 203, 259, 262; and emergence 5–​6, 39, 40; as history 159, 207; and human potentiality 241; and intentions 203; and intransitive objects 17, 116, 272;

 289

Index 289 and problem of elisionism 171; and projects 117, 168–​69 totality 28, 35, 56, 57, 64–​66, 272; and consciousness 86–​87; and human capacities 263n22 transcendental realism 21, 23, 35–​36; and agent-​structure relationship 193; and deduction 20; and mechanisms 49; and ontological speculation 195 unified social theory 1–​3, 137, 155n14, 172 virtue ethics 10, 237, 241–​52, 253, 262; arete 241, 255; and deontology 245–​46; eudaimonia 63, 241–​42, 246, 255; and human telos 151n8, 156,

242–​52, 255, 258, 264, 265, 269, 275, 277, 278; and internal goods 242–​44, 254, 266; as mechanism 243; phronesis 241, 242; and practices 241, 242–​43, 248, 258, 255 volunteerism 7, 19, 67, 114, 170, 171, 184, 200n4 Weber, Max 200 Wight, Colin 122n19 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 18 Yalom, Irvin 155–​56 Žižek, Slavoj 117n16, 130n22, 144, 151; and fundamental fantasy 149–​50, 151n9

290